jock

@H1H1 Try with this other multitool: https://users.armbian.com/jock/rk322x/multitool/multitool-old-tee.img.xz

@H1H1 Yes, the original firmware uses 1.5mbps uart rate, but the multitool uses 115200bps, so you should be able to see the output of the multitool if you set your uart adapter to 115200bps. However I see some unexpected messages : [9hjjNa:N\xDF\xC7\xDF\xC1\xD0\xC7\xDF\xC5l\xDF\xC2\xDF\xC3@NfN\xDF\xC0\xDF at the bottom of the log. It may be garbage, or may be something the TEE (the Trust OS) does not like at all, hence the freeze with the multitool. Could you please try 115200bps and see if you get any output? Also the output of the original firmware boot (1.5mbps) would be interesting. It could be that I need to craft a special multitool with a different Trust OS, but I need to know which version boots on your board

@H1H1 Hello. That board is very well supported in armbian. The serial port is available on those 4 pins between the two USB ports. The pin with the square frame is GND. The only problem with the serial is that it is disconnected, but can be connected with a very very small amount of soldering over two couple of pads that have been left without the component. You have to be very careful and need a steady hand to do a good job. Using some paper tape to cover a couple of pads while soldering the other couple may help you avoid damage to the board.

Fixed

@ego worker well, that's very curious that on your first attempt it did not work... I still see that, despite the newer v2022.04 u-boot version, the dtbo overlay was still not applied 😕 Anyway, good to see that you finally got it working!

@ego worker thanks for checking in. Perhaps the bootloader installed in the internal flash memory is too old. I see that u-boot is v2021.04, but current one is v2022.04. Your version is not applying the device tree overlays at all, hence the instability and the missing HDMI when trying to run armbian. You may try to transfer the updated bootloader from the sdcard to the internal flash with: sudo dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=/dev/mmcblk2 bs=32k skip=1 seek=1 count=32 but also double check that you have overlays=led-conf7 in /boot/armbianEnv.txt (check also on both the internal flash and sdcard; u-boot should take the one from the boot device, but bugs in u-boot are around the corner...)

That's the main problem for the general solution you propose. Looking into the base device tree of the kernel (rk322x.dtsi), that gpio pin (gpio 2, pin RK_PB3) is declared in use only by gigabit ethernet devices. Also looking in the original device trees of the boards there is no other trace than gigabit ethernet pin. Surely no tv box with rk322x has been produced with gigabit ethernet, so from that point of view it could be safe to enable it. But looking at the base dtsi is not enough to declare that any board does not use that pin: as it happens on r29/r2b/h20, any other manufacturer may have decided that the pin may control something more or less important, or perhaps it is internally wired to something, tinkering with that may affect other boards. It is a remote possibility, though it can happen. Multitool (and libreelec too) has the pin enabled by default, so we will see if it can have side effects on other boards.

I already opened a pull request on armbian, when it will be accepted, new kernel will be built with fixes, but I have no control on when the new kernels will be built by the armbian servers.

Yes, it is expected that is so: you must run rk322x-config, set led-conf7 and reboot (or setup led-conf7 manually in /boot/armbianEnv.txt) Legacy kernel is discontinued, has some reason only for those who have old boards with NAND. You have no reason to stay with legacy kernel, it's old, insecure and unmaintained!

@Benedito Portela Here it is a debian buster minimal image with latest 6.5 kernel. I did not had time to test it though, so try it with an sdcard first! edit: tested the image, it works plenty well!

@occams razor I produced a bunch of deb packages with update dtbs, you can find them here, in particular you can test this deb package for edge kernel 6.5. You should get a new led-conf8 overlay, so you can remove led-conf7 and add led-conf8 in /boot/armbianEnv.txt, reboot and see if the board boots and works.

@MattWestB I've uploaded convenient deb packages with update dtbs for both kernel 6.1 and 6.5; now they should be finally fixed and work, at least I tested on my board and they work pretty fine. You can download the deb package from here - for your installed system with kernel 6.1 you may want to download and install linux-dtb-current package Please do a backup as you already did of the /boot/dtb directory on your existing installation!

I resume this thread because there have been some advancements in the HDMI problem on the R29 boards and, discussing with @ilmich and @fabiobassa, we noticed that there are some similarities with the H20 boards. @occams razor here also posted his experience with a H20 board and the photos are very informative because his board has the marking H20_221_V1.71, while the board in this thread is H20_221_V1.5. The difference is important, because @occams razor's V1.71 boots but has no HDMI, while V1.5 board does not boot at all. Despite the different form factor of the two boards, the V1.71 looks like having three high power switching regulators, while the V1.5 has just two of them. Looking at the DTB, probably both of them require to switch a GPIO to enable HDMI exactly as like as R29/R2B boards, but the H20_221_V1.5 probably is not capable to run the CPU above 1Ghz, while the V1.71 can. Multitool has been fixed for R29/R2B boards, but now it should run and show HDMI also on all H20 boards. I posted here an experimental image that H20 users can test too, enabling led-conf7 overlay as well. I may also provide a special overlay for @occams razor for his H20 V1.71, which should perhaps be able to run cpu up to 1.4 ghz

The Debian version has nothing to do with the underneath hardware. It's just that if you use an older image simply you miss some corrections and compatibility fixes here and there that allowed the eMCP boards work in a stable way.

Ok, I need to better check what is going on with kernel 6.1 then; perhaps it is a misalignment with the base dtb, but I will try to be more specific tomorrow. Thanks in the meantime!

@Benedito Portela I checked your firwmare and actually R29_MXQ and R2B_MXQ share the same identical original device tree, so you can go testing the image, just follow the instruction and try with a pristine system on sdcard/usb stick, not juggling with dtbs on existing systems

@MattWestB This is the dtb for kernel 6.1, it should work on your existing installation: rk322x-led-conf7.dtbo

@MattWestB Perfect, thanks! I see the eMMC is correctly detected and ethernet working too, so probably my sample is just defective.

@MattWestB Ubuntu or debian does not matter, the dtb depends upon the kernel version. The image above has kernel 6.5 (edge) and I ask to briefly test it as is, in particular look over hdmi, emmc and ethernet and report dmesg. Jiggling with dtbs over other kernels, or use multitool dtb on armbian (baaad!!! never do this!) is a hazard: it may work or may end up with a broken system and a broken system surely does not help anyone 😐

@MattWestB @Benedito Portela guys I appreciate your feedback, but please use the armbian image I gave from an sdcard and post the dmesg log if you can. Doing cut&paste over custom setups just makes me really confused. If you already have regular Armbian installed on eMMC/eMCP, just burn the new image on sdcard, plug the sdcard and boot the board. Your installed system won't be touched because sdcard boot has priority over internal flash. When Armbian is installed, boot priority is always sdcard, then USB stick, then internal flash.

UPDATE FOR R29-MXQ USERS! Hello, this is an update for those people who has R29 board and have suffered issues regarding stability problems and no HDMI output. I had the chance to have a board in my lab thanks to @Hudson FAS and something is moving! What's wrong with this board: Differently from any other known board, it has a specific GPIO pin to turn the HDMI on and off: discovering such GPIO required extensive trial and error, it was disguised in the original dtb as "power-hold" 😅 But the main problem with this board is that it has no power regulation for CPU, so it cannot run faster than 1Ghz. The default dtb shipped with Armbian and Multitool are set to run the CPU up to 1.2Ghz. For this reason, some (most?) unlucky R29 samples were totally unable to boot with the default configuration. I still need some help from community though: my sampl is able to boot and works stable but: emmc does not work ethernet does not work unless I downgrade the link to 10 Mbit/s I suspect my sample is damaged, but I need a feedback from other users to understand if there's something more in the dtb to discover or it is just my sample. Multitool you can download a fixed version from here. It should work flawlessy and HDMI should turn on with no problems. Armbian you still need to do some manual passages: Burn the multitool on a sdcard, run it on the board, make a backup of the original firmware then erase the internal flash to force sdcard boot. Store the backup on a safe place; if you wish, it would be appreciated if a copy can be shared here for further studies! Burn this Debian Bookworm minimal Armbian image on the sdcard, the try to boot the board. If you're able to boot, access via ssh, run rk322x-config, select your configuration options and select led-conf7 as GPIO configuration in the last passage, then reboot; you're done! if your board does not boot, mount the sdcard partition and manually add overlays=led-conf7 in /boot/armbianEnv.txt, then you should be able to boot Thanks!

@Aapo Tahkola I guess you have some other kind of problem (ie: stability problem), because such error should never happen on both slow or fast boards, as long as it does not happen on any board I have around.

Have a box with rk3528 here and did some work some weeks ago, mainly to get a kernel and multitool running on it. It works, but I didn't publish an image for it yet (only available in source code), plus my board does not want to boot from sdcard and had no time and no will to further study it better.

@Alex ThreeD Well I think that's a little of a mess there... the patch says rk356x fix, but actually it is doing something different and I saw that those hunks were also mentioned in the libreelec kernel patches for all rockchip socs (LE patches are my reference "Bible" about video and DRM). I made some test with other LE patches and they were fixing some other rk3399 configurations, but still there are plenty of them to be included (~40 patches) that is not a good idea to submit them yet to armbian rockchip64 branch. However, I think that if the patch was lost in transition, feel free to fix the thing, send a PR and I will approve and merge the fix 👍

@Alex ThreeDthanks for investigating this! I suspected some kind or problem like that, there are some bits that have changed in a function to validate the modelines. I don't know when I will be able to fix the thing, but perhaps it could ben enough to revert the function to previous behaviour