jock

@ArturHey you did a lot of experimentation, but actually I think you are stuck on something different. GPT partition error message is something you can totally ignore, either because stock firmware usually don't provide a GPT partition, and armbian images neither do.
 
The rockchip miniloader supports GPT partition table, but it is not mandatory to work. If there's a GPT partition, the miniloader searches for "uboot" and "trust" partitions to use them as hints for the base addresses. If there's no GPT partition, it will just use default base addresses and look for the LOADER and TRUST signatures.
 
Anyway, armbian does not use anything from that: there is no rockchip miniloader, neither are GPT partitions or other proprietary code, except for the Trust OS, which is embedded into u-boot. The boot process is totally different on armbian.
 
Now, the issue you have with flash not being recognized by rkdeveloptool makes me think about three possibile situations:
a bug in rkdeveloptool you are still in maskrom mode and did not upload the usbplug firmware with rkdeveloptool db (ie: the board is not yet initialized) a broken flash in the eMCP part  
You can, for example, refer to the procedure Installation (without SD card, board with eMMC) described in the first post of this thread if you want to write a raw image in the flash memory but I always suggest to erase the flash memory and test the image via sdcard first, rather than installing the image immediately, because you can softbrick the board.
 
About the non-booting multitool, you should post some logs from the serial uart, but probably the main issue is related to the trust os which freezes the board after few seconds.

Technically CMA is not needed at all for the VOP. Rockchip VOP has its own MMU, it is not like raspberry pi or amlogic devices. It should not require to reserve and map memory by the kernel for the VOP as long as the MMU is enabled in the device tree and it is working correctly.
 

Nice, congratulations!
 
I wonder why cursor does not show when video is playing by the way: there has always been a patch in the armbian code to support hardware cursor, in fact in X11/Wayland the cursor is handled in hardware and it is perfectly visible and usable when a hardware accelerated video is playing.
 
Also I wonder why you need CMA=256M; normally rk322x VPU has its own MMU that is capable to handle direct to memory access without the need of CMA.

Inspired by the incredible work @jock and @ilmich have done to make the RK322x platform stable on mainline Linux, I decided to tackle the application side of things. My goal was to turn these "e-waste" TV boxes into fully functional, low-latency Android Auto head units for our cars.
 
This fork of OpenAuto is built as one of my "Is it possible to turn this into that?" projects. It turned out to be one heck of a nightmare to pull off, but at the same time a lot of fun because I can see the potential of these TV Boxes as something you can actually put in your car and turn into a usable head unit!



 

 
System Requirements
Target Device: RK322x TV Box (e.g., MXQ Pro 4K). OS: Armbian Bookworm or Trixie (Kernel 6.1+ recommended). RAM: 1GB recommended. FFMPEG Installed: This build requires a specific build of ffmpeg that can be found here.  
Release: v2.0.0-alpha
This release represents a major architectural overhaul. I have removed heavy dependencies (PulseAudio, QtAudio, GStreamer) in favor of a lean, direct-to-hardware pipeline using RtAudio (ALSA) and FFmpeg v4l2_request.
 
Download:
https://github.com/Harleythetech/openauto-rk3229-armbian/releases
 
Technical Details
Video Engine: Switched from GStreamer to a custom FFmpeg + V4L2-Request backend. Leverages the v4l2drmprime patch set for Zero-Copy rendering. Enables full hardware H.264 decoding on Rockchip stateless decoders. Result: Stable 1080p 60fps stream on a 1GB RAM device. Audio Overhaul: Replaced PulseAudio and QtAudio with RtAudio. This creates a direct, low-latency path to the ALSA hardware driver. Display: Targets linuxfb (Framebuffer) by default instead (eglfs and ffmpeg have issues when you run them together due to DRM master lock)  
Configuration
This release requires a specific ALSA configuration to allow audio mixing (dmix) without PulseAudio. Create/Edit /etc/asound.conf:
 
pcm.!default { type asym playback.pcm "dmix_hdmi" capture.pcm "plug_null" } ctl.!default { type hw card 0 } pcm.plug_null { type plug slave.pcm "null" } pcm.dmix_hdmi { type dmix ipc_key 1024 ipc_perm 0666 slave { pcm { type hw card 0 device 0 } format S16_LE rate 48000 channels 2 period_size 512 buffer_size 4096 } bindings { 0 0 1 1 } }  
Known Issues
Invisible Cursor: The mouse cursor works but is currently invisible when the FFmpeg video backend is active (rendering layer order issue). Backend Fallback: In rare edge cases where DRM initialization fails, the app may incorrectly default to Qt software output. Probably more, i haven't tested it that much  
 
Development Status: Active & Seeking Contributors Currently, I am the sole maintainer focusing on the RK322x platform (specifically the RK3229).
I am actively looking for developers interested in expanding support to other devices (such as RK3328, RK3399, or Allwinner H3/H6). If you have experience with C++, Qt, or V4L2/DRM and want to help turn these TV boxes into capable head units, contributions are highly welcome!
 
Repository: https://github.com/Harleythetech/openauto-rk3229-armbian
 
 
Credits:
@jock and @ilmich for ffmpeg patches and the csc-armbian-for-rk322x-tv-box-boards opencardev for openauto and aasdk

@Harleyyyu
Your project could be interesting , I would suggest to open a dedicated 3ad on It own so people can contribute.
 
As you have already realized by yourself quite all  hardware and drivers aspects of this rk322x soc have bene investigated by @jockand/or @ilmich
 
But if you achieve any progress on GENERAL drivers and performance that isn't already been discussed or achieved you can came back here to share
 
Thanks

Sorry @Harleyyyu, but me and @fabiobassa were a bit puzzled about your journey within the hardware video decoding.
 
I recently tested the kernel 6.18 (but I am pretty sure it works fine also in kernel 6.12/6.6/6.1), but everything was already in place even with zero-copy DMA buffers, using the LibreELEC patches which are already compiled in the mainline kernel shipped with armbian for years right now.
 
Then there is also this apt repository I brought up few months ago with ffmpeg already patched and some instructions to run mpv with hardware decoding, which so far works for me either in virtual terminal and wayland (although sometimes with some glitches).
 
Just to let you know, because it looks like hardware video decoding, HDMI and GPU things are unsupported, but actually everything works fine.

Sorry @Harleyyyu, but me and @fabiobassa were a bit puzzled about your journey within the hardware video decoding.
 
I recently tested the kernel 6.18 (but I am pretty sure it works fine also in kernel 6.12/6.6/6.1), but everything was already in place even with zero-copy DMA buffers, using the LibreELEC patches which are already compiled in the mainline kernel shipped with armbian for years right now.
 
Then there is also this apt repository I brought up few months ago with ffmpeg already patched and some instructions to run mpv with hardware decoding, which so far works for me either in virtual terminal and wayland (although sometimes with some glitches).
 
Just to let you know, because it looks like hardware video decoding, HDMI and GPU things are unsupported, but actually everything works fine.

@Harleyyyu  See this thread; hardware video decoding works fine with mainline kernel and does not need vendor MPP. Debian Trixie although has a "broken" mpv that won't work, better stay with Bookworm
 

hello @digital, in some rare cases there are some minor trickeries to try and improve compatibility with eMMC.
 
If you run rk322x-config, there is a panel dedicated to eMMC which allows you to select some compatiblity options, like emmc-pins and DDR/UHS modes. You may try first enabling emmc-pins and rebooting to see if it gets recognized. Anyway photos of the board and the original stock device tree could be useful to identify the compatibility problem.

­DISCLAIMER (PLEASE READ): everything you can find in this thread (binaries, texts, code snippets, etc...) are provided AS-IS and are not part of official Armbian project. For this reason not people from Armbian project nor myself are responsible for misuse or loss of functionality of hardware.

Please don't ask about support or assistance in other non-community forums nor in the official Armbian github repository, instead post your questions in this thread, in the TV Boxes forum section (hardware related) or in the Peer-to-peer support section (general linux/software related).

Thank you!
 
This thread is to give stable and mature long-term range support to rk3318/rk3328 found in many tv boxes in Armbian project as Community Supported Configuration (CSC).
The current work is mainlined into Armbian project, but your mileage may vary; most recent developments live on my personal fork on github -> here <-
 
Important notes: is just a personal opinion, but apparently widely supported, that rk3318 chip is not an official rockchip part. They probably are scrap rk3328 parts which have not passed conformance tests but are sold anyway to tv boxes manufacturers. They don’t reach the same operating frequency of the rk3328, have much higher leakage currents (and thus higher temperatures) and often the boards they are installed on are low quality with low quality components, in fact a very very common issue is the eMMC failure due to bad parts and bad soldering. So said, I personally suggest not to buy any rk3318 tv box, but instead find a properly supported SBC (Single Board Computer) if you need a reliable product. In the unfortunate case you already have such product, this thread may help you have some fun with them.
 
What works:
    • Works on RK3318 and RK3328 TV boxes with DDR3 memories
    • Mainline u-boot
    • Mainline ATF provided as Trusted Execution Environment
    • All 4 cores are working
    • Ethernet
    • Serial UART (configured at stock 1.5Mbps)
    • Thermals and frequency scaling
    • OTG USB 2.0 port (also as boot device!)
    • EHCI/OHCI USB 2.0 ports and XHCI USB 3.0 ports
    • MMC subsystem (including , SD and sdio devices)
    • Hardware video acceleration (fully supported via RKMPP on legacy kernel, support via hantro and rkvdec kernel driver on mainline)
    • Various WIFI over SDIO are supported
    • Full acceleration on legacy kernel and mainline kernel
    • U-boot boot order priority: first the sdcard, then the USB OTG port and eventually the internal ; you can install u-boot (and the whole system) in the internal and u-boot will always check for images on external sdcard/USB first.
 
Unbrick:
Technically, rockchip devices cannot be bricked. If the internal flash does not contain a bootable system, they will always boot from the sdcard. If, for a reason, the bootable system on the internal flash is corrupted or is unable to boot correctly, you can always force the maskrom mode shorting the clock pin on the PCB. The procedure is explained here for rk322x, but for rk3318/28 is the same.

In most of the rk3318/28 boards, shorting the clock pin is difficult or impossible because eMMC are BGA chips with no exposed pins. Pay double attention when burning something on the internal flash memory and always test first the image booting from the sdcard to be sure it works before burning anything in internal flash.
 
This is a list of posts where forum users have been able to spot the eMMC clock pin to trigger the maskrom mode:
H96 Max+ (board signature: RK3318_V1.4) by @Gausus X88 PRO 10 (board signature: X88_PRO_B) by @mathgaming HK1 Max (board signature YX_RK3318) by @Constantin Gatej Ninkbox N1 Max RK3318 by @enigmasphinx Hongtop H50 (board signature t98-3318-221-v11) by @GmP  
 
Partecipation and debugging:
If you want to partecipate or need help debugging issues, do not hesitate to share your experience with the installation procedure of the boxes.
In case of issues and missed support, provide as many as possible of these things is very useful to try and bring support for an unsupported board:
 
some photos of both sides of the board. Details of the eMMC, DDR and Wifi chips are very useful! upload the device tree binary (dtb) of your device. We can understand a lot of things of the hardware from that small piece of data; and alternative is a link to the original firmware (you can do a full backup with the Multitool); dmesg and other logs (use armbianmonitor -u that automatically collects and uploads the logs online) attach a serial converter to the device and provide the output of the serial port;  
Multimedia:
Mainline kernel: 3D acceleration is provided by Lima driver and is already enabled. Hardware video decoding: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/19258-testing-hardware-video-decoding-rockchip-allwinner/ Legacy kernel: If you need multimedia features, like OpenGL/OpenGL ES acceleration, hardware accelerated Kodi, ffmpeg and mpv you can take a look to this post  
Installation (via SD card):
Building:
You can build your own image follow the common steps to build armbian for other tv boxes devices: when you are in the moment to choose the target board, switch to /TVB/ boards and select "rk3318-box" from the list.
   
Prebuilt images:
Nightly stables - built from trunk by Armbian servers and GPG-signed: https://github.com/armbian/community  
Multitool:
Multitool - A small but powerful image for RK3318/RK3328 TV Box maintenance. Download it from here  
Quick installation instructions on eMMC:
Build or download your preferred Armbian image and a copy of the Multitool; Burn the Multitool on an SD card; once done, place the Armbian image in images folder of the SD card NTFS partition; Plug the SD card in the TV box and plug in the power cord. After some seconds the blue led starts blinking and the Multitool appears; OPTIONAL: you can do a backup of the existing firmware with "Backup flash" menu option; Choose "Burn image to flash" from the menu, then select the destination device (usually mmcblk2) and the image to burn; Wait for the process to complete, then choose "Shutdown" from main menu; Unplug the power cord and the SD card, then replug the power cord; Wait for 10 seconds, then the led should start blinking and HDMI will turn on. The first time the boot process will take a couple of minutes or more because the filesystem is going to be resized, so be patient and wait for the login prompt. On first boot you will be asked for entering a password for root user of your choice and the name and password for a regular user Run rk3318-config to configure the board specific options Run armbian-config to configure timezone, locales and other personal options Congratulations, Armbian is now installed!  
Despite the procedure above is simple and reliable, I always recommend to first test that your device boots Armbian images from SD Card.
Due to the really large hardware variety, there is the rare chance that the images proposed here may not boot. If a bad image is burned in , the box may not boot anymore forcing you to follow the unbrick section at the top of this post.
 
Quick installation instructions to boot from SD Card:
If you are already running Armbian from eMMC, skip to the next step. Instead if you are running the original firmware you need to first erase the internal flash; to do so download the Multitool, burn it on an SD Card, plug the SD Card and power the TV Box. Use "Backup flash" if you want to do a backup of the existing firmware, then choose "Erase flash" menu option. Build or download your preferred Armbian image; Uncompress and burn the Armbian image on the SD Card; Plug the SD Card in the TV Box and power it on; Wait for 10 seconds, then the led should start blinking and HDMI will turn on. The first time the boot process will take a couple of minutes or more because the filesystem is going to be resized, so be patient and wait for the login prompt; On first boot you will be asked for entering a password for root user of your choice and the name and password for a regular user Run rk3318-config to configure the board specific options Run armbian-config to configure timezone, locales and other personal options, or also to transfer the SD Card installation to internal ; Congratulations, Armbian is running from SD Card!  
Tutorial - How to install Armbian on your TV Box (by @awawa) :
https://www.hyperhdr.eu/2022/01/tv-box-mania-i-part-x88-pro-10.html
A note about boot device order:
With Armbian also comes mainline U-boot. If you install Armbian, the bootloader will look for valid bootable images in this order:
External SD Card External USB Stick in OTG Port Internal  
The Multitool does not boot / How to burn image directly on eMMC:
 
Some boards have the sdcard attached to an auxiliary (called also sdmmc_ext or external) controller which is not the common one.
Forum findings declare that those boards are not able to boot from sdcard with stock firmware and they neither do in maskrom mode: the stock firmware always boots even if you put the multitool on sdcard.
 
In such case, burning images directly on eMMC is the only way to have a working Armbian installation.
You can follow these instructions by @fabiobassa to burn images directly on eMMC:
 
https://forum.armbian.com/topic/17597-csc-armbian-for-rk3318rk3328-tv-box-boards/?do=findComment&comment=130453
 
Notes and special hardware:
Script to change DDR memory frequency here Wireless chip AP2734, SP2734, HY2734C and similars: they are clones of AmPAK AP6334 which is combo wifi + bluetooth of broadcom BCM4334/B0 chips. You may need a special nvram file, instructions by @paradigman are here  
Critics, suggestions and contributions are welcome!
 
Credits:
@fabiobassa for his ideas, inspiration, great generosity in giving the boards for development and testing. The project of bringing rk3318 into armbian would not have begun without his support! @hexdump for his precious support in early testing, ideas and suggestions
@MX10.AC2Nfor his patience in testing mxq-rk3328-d4 board support
All the rockhip64 maintainers at Armbian project who have done and do most of the work to support the platform
 
 

@0230826 you can follow instructions in this page by @fabiobassa The loader is there too

modprobe parameter should be crystal=1, not crystal_26M_en anymore (see here)
 
Otherwise you could try led-conf6 overlay (but I don't know if it fits your board...) which has the attribute esp,crystal-26M-en = <1> in the device tree to set the crystal to 26 MHz

@Jerry Falken
I am pretty sure you jumped in this 3ad without reading all of it, and this is unfair .

You are right, it is huge, but such question you ask have been already answered in the past many times , and I will answer just as a form of courtesy , but will not go back in the future on the same question again

If you look at your board you can spot 3 pads : tx rx gnd . That is all is needed, no 5 volts just tx rx gnd
Those pads are the "uart" , in other words there you will see ALL that happens when the board starts, if is a rk 322x or other fake print, if it is ddr3 or ddr2 manyyyyy manyyy infos to debug the whole process. For me it is a 3229 with ddr3 memory but uart will tell you
Go find in the 1st post the speed of uart to use with putty or minicom ( spoiler :1500000 🙃 )

just for sake of coriousity, this si the setting I have in my lab: ALWAYS and I repeat ALWAYS a uart connected to debug what is going so if you need answer.. post the right questions and not generic ones 

g on

No need to recompile, rk322x already have had all the right bits in the right place for years. Everything is written down in the first page of the thread for rk332x tv boxes (What works: ---> Hardware video acceleration) in the hope people read it.

I tell you to read the first post of the thread.

@Aroldo Bossoni
 
The optimal would be understanding the reason why the watchdog triggers, but could be a difficult task without a hint because of the closed source proprietary trust os.
 
The easiest thing is to provide armbian images with the opensource trust os rather than the proprietary, which is totally feasible because it just requires to swap a file in the armbian build scripts. That would blow the issue away, but unfortunately the proprietary trust os provided DDR scaling and virtual poweroff. The latter is a seldom used feature, but the DDR scaling provided a dramatic improvement in performance and it is hard to give up on that.
 
Swapping the things at runtime is not savvy: when u-boot updates, the proprietary trust os will be reinstalled overwriting whatever you put in there.
 
I would be happy with opensource Trust OS and no runtime DDR scaling, but stil having it at a fixed decent rate (660MHz, instead of the default 330MHz), but some boards do not boot at all when they are instructed to boot at 660MHz.

Attached the source overlay file for the tm16xx driver. All features working.   See for details and thanks to https://github.com/jefflessard .
rx3318-H50.dtso.txt

@Vinicius Guastala I agree with @fabiobassa, thanks for the very detailed post of your board and broad description of the behaviour.
I would suggest you to erase the internal flash and try to boot from sdcard with this armbian image. It is an "experimental" image with opensource Trust OS; many recent boards are having issues with proprietary trust os, possibly yours has similar issues, so you could give a shot to this. By the way, the serial log output would be indeed very handy if you have the chance to find the serial port.
 
Beware also that armbian (and multitool) use 115200bps baud rate for the serial, while proprietary software uses 1.5Mbps baud rate!

@Virgilio Junior  you can use multitool, and use the "jump start" installation: you should be able to boot from sdcard and USB as well without doing the process by hand.
Forget about the NAND, it causes troubles you would not deal with

Found with google: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/34923-csc-armbian-for-rk322x-tv-box-boards/page/96/#findComment-218361
 

In theory, it shouldn't

AFAIK bookworm is fine with wayland (weston, kde, ...)

Hi, welcome everyone. I’m using an H50 TV box that I was about to throw away because I thought I had completely bricked it.
I disassembled it and found the pins to activate maskrom mode.
I think this could be useful for everyone.
I then installed the current image, and everything seems to work except for the HDMI output (blank screen).
Do you have any suggestions? Thanks. Some data and photo below.
In case you want to install please note that also multitool fails to activate the HDMI, so you will need SSH to config.
 
SOC: RK3188 (Hopefully - I did not remove the heatsink)
eMMC: Samsung KLMBG4GEAC-B001 32GB (64x4)
eMCP: Samsung KMQN10006B 8 GB eMMC + 1 GB LPDDR3 RAM
Wi-Fi IC 339S0209 2.4G/5G
 
LAN working
WIFI Working
 
----------------------------
root@rk3318-box:~# lscpu
Architecture:                aarch64
  CPU op-mode(s):            32-bit, 64-bit
  Byte Order:                Little Endian
CPU(s):                      4
  On-line CPU(s) list:       0-3
Vendor ID:                   ARM
  Model name:                Cortex-A53
    Model:                   4
    Thread(s) per core:      1
    Core(s) per cluster:     4
    Socket(s):               -
    Cluster(s):              1
    Stepping:                r0p4
    CPU(s) scaling MHz:      60%
    CPU max MHz:             1008.0000
    CPU min MHz:             600.0000
    BogoMIPS:                48.00
    Flags:                   fp asimd evtstrm aes pmull sha1 sha2 crc32 cpuid
Caches (sum of all):
  L1d:                       128 KiB (4 instances)
  L1i:                       128 KiB (4 instances)
  L2:                        256 KiB (1 instance)
NUMA:
  NUMA node(s):              1
  NUMA node0 CPU(s):         0-3
Vulnerabilities:
  Gather data sampling:      Not affected
  Indirect target selection: Not affected
  Itlb multihit:             Not affected
  L1tf:                      Not affected
  Mds:                       Not affected
  Meltdown:                  Not affected
  Mmio stale data:           Not affected
  Reg file data sampling:    Not affected
  Retbleed:                  Not affected
  Spec rstack overflow:      Not affected
  Spec store bypass:         Not affected
  Spectre v1:                Mitigation; __user pointer sanitization
  Spectre v2:                Not affected
  Srbds:                     Not affected
  Tsa:                       Not affected
  Tsx async abort:           Not affected
  Vmscape:                   Not affected
 
root@rk3318-box:~# free -l
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:         1504636      291372     1037440       46940      297848     1213264
Low:         1504636      467196     1037440
High:              0           0           0
Swap:         752316           0      752316
 
SOME TESTS ON THE HDMI ISSUE:
hdmi_debug_20251008_230528.log
 
hdmi_test_20251008_230948.log


 
 

I troubleshooted my problem! So for some reason (I'm not sure if this is for all x88 pro 10's), the SD card needed to be under pressure on it to read Multitool. So, throughout the entire Multitool process, I needed to hold down the SD card with my thumb. I did hurt a bit, but it flashed to the EMMC   

I came here to thank @jock

https://github.com/armbian/build/pull/8679
 
and ask you to make the test @Vincenzoernst1 @GBEM @guenter
you don't need to install external driver anymore

merged 2 commits into armbian:main from paolosabatino:update-tm16xx  4 days ago

Available since https://github.com/armbian/build/tree/v25.11.0-trunk.258
rockchip rk3566: h96-TVbox: Include i2c Led Pins into dts. by @hqnicolas in armbian/build#8666
rockchip64: update tm16xx driver from kernel mailing list. by @paolosabatino in armbian/build#8679