fabiobassa

Multitool update!
 
Hello! I'm pleased to announce that multitool finally got network and SSH access, and now can be used on headless systems!
 
The latest release will retrieve an IP from the network DHCP server automatically, so you can consult your local network router to discover what IP the box got.
SSH access can be obtained logging in as root user; no password is requested.
Example with IP 192.168.1.18:
paolo@predatorg:~$ ssh root@192.168.1.18 Welcome to Multitool SSH session! root@multitool:~#  
 
Link-local access:
 
Multitool will also, by default, listen to link-local 169.254.120.120/16 address. This is useful if you have no DHCP server or have troubles retrieving the IP address.
Note that to access such private IP you need to set a network interface of your PC on the same subnet, or also use a virtual interface.
 
Here there is an example using ip assigning address 169.254.89.32/16 to virtual interface eth0:1 (address can be changed at your pleasure, interface must be the same interface you use to access the box, ie: wlan0, enp0s25, or whatever):
ip addr add 169.254.89.32/16 brd + dev eth0 label eth0:1  
or if you prefer old but good ifconfig:
ifconfig eth0:1 169.254.89.32/16  
then the multitool is accessible to 169.254.120.120:
paolo@predatorg:~$ ssh root@169.254.120.120 Welcome to Multitool SSH session! root@multitool:~#  
Of course link-local access won't work if you have multiple devices running multitool on the same network, since all of them will conflict because they have the same IP; in such case use the IP provided by DHCP.

Thanks @jock for comments.
The problem is that user like my with boxes that the HDMI is not working and then cant getting mulltitool working at all also from serial console so being complete blind and if copy your first part of mulltitool and copy one armbian to on partitation after the boot part is possible installing armbian without problem in EMMC with SSH.
Is it OK posing part of your mulltitool with added system partition on git-hub if some user is requesting it ?
 
I have only found focal with desktop and installing it i only have little more than 2G free flash and HA is needing that or more so i need mounting the SD-card in docker storage directory then i have 64G for containers and still can installing things and doing updates.
 
The LEDs is right configuration and changing is not helping (the LED is power off mode) so i must trying your trigger if google can giving my the right guldens.
 
@fabiobassa you are more then welcome PM my or you can open issue in one of my git-hubs repros like https://github.com/MattWestb/R29-MXQ-LP3-V2.3-00908.
Im not one expert on HA but have much knowledge with ZHA part and the Zigbee system and device.
If i can help with some problem or sharing some good or bad experience is very OK for my and you looks have much knowledge in other interesting technical things.
 
PS the soldering is not so good that it can being but working and it can being better done but with the age its more Shaking Stevens have doing it ;-))
 
Mvh  Mattias

@MattWestB
compliments for your installation, looks fine

Are you ok on home assistant ? would ask something,  maybe i can send you a private message ?

 

I was rebooting the box after nearly 8 days of up time with HA supervised and that is not bad for the "first try" running it on the new hardware.
I was not liking the external SD-Card that is 4/5 outside of the box and im using micro SD-card so i was baying one cheep USB card reader and desolating the SD socket and soldering up side down on the back side of the external in the box so i can mounting the SD-card or one adapter for micro SD-card inside the box and having the docker container storage on it and its working OK. (only 2 pads was tricky getting OK in the middle and dont looks so nice but is working OK)
 
I was doing one mistake that i can fixing but im sure some knowing how to do that.
By using commands shutdown the box is being shutdown and cant being powered on then its not having any power button so must re powering by taking  the power cord away and back but after that the power LED is always off also if i changing the LED config with RK-config.
Is it possible sending one command type "LED on" so its start working or some other work around ?
If booting on external SD-card or USB with one new installed armbian its working  OK until using shutdown.
 
@jock in the first post in "Quick installation instructions to boot from SD Card:" you is writing "Erase flash" and then Build or download your preferred Armbian image and writing it to one SD-card and booting armbian.
But its not working then its not bootloader in the internal flash so the chip is trying to finding one on the SD-card = OK but all armbian images is only system in and no bootloder so the chip cant booting if not adding one bootloader and  u-boot on the SD-card before the system partition. Have i misunderstanding some thing or is it one typo ?
If having one image with "normal" bootloader and u-boot and one minimal system partition (one meg or so) then it shall being extending the partition and copy one system partition the card having it booting OK also for no Linux skill window user with minitols that can extending Linux partitions and also copy them between dicks from windows.
 
Thanks for great support and work with our boxes and hope next Ubuntu LTS is coming soon (beta is booting OK but is not  working OK for one week ago) and working great on them in near future !!
 

@Wester_Minsk
 

I suppose you want to build a uboot for supporting booting from usb3 .
This isn't a simple task and if it was simple,  somebody else already could had done for all of us. It is needed deep knowledge of processes undergoing the compilation and the modding of c sources. It isn't just a flag " boot from usb3..." but a chain on changes to do to the code, if someone already has written a code for it

By the way here is the link
https://github.com/rockchip-linux/u-boot

but then don't ask for assistance in what when and where apply patch since if this infos were clear and well known uboot already had have usb3 support.

But you really welcome to study and share your results

@chinhhut

Try these steps:
1) push the little switch inside the hole while inserting a male-male cable into the otg
2) on another linux machine you should have now a new device (lsusb will help you) and you can run rkdeveloptool
3) rkdeveloptool ld should List Device
4) rkdeveloptool rd 3 should Reset Device into mode 3  ( maskrom )
5) rkdeveloptool db MiniLoaderAll.bin ( of course from your path) should upload a temporary loader to recognize the internal emmc
6) if all is successfull until now you can rkdeveloptool wl 0X0 yourimage.img . This should flash the internal emmc .

DISCLAIMER: very " dangerous" approach , be ready to have the opportunity to short the emmc clock pin to ground to go back into mask rom
 
MiniLoaderAll.zip

@chinhhut
Glad you got success .
Don't forget to put a like that helps @jock and myself in community reputation
 
 
 

@Trần Minh Thảo
what operating system are you using to flash device ?
you need UBUNTU or DEBIAN , latest versions

@Trần Minh Thảo

 

What is for rkbin-master for you  ???????  What do you think  is it purpose ?

 

Ciao Fabio,
 
thanks,but you are too kind.. I am just carrying out a project that allowed me not to throw away my box
Most of time I spent trying and trying again (I have no way to use a UART port because on my motherboard it's hidden ), and trying to figure out how you solved the problems. 
Then, being a lover of open source, I try to give back something to community.
 
In any case I have noticed some good progress on the 5.15.y kernel for the 322x socs.
Probably if someone else doesn't, I'll try to port libreelec to one of the recent versions.
I'm a slackware user, so forgive me if I'm not a debian lover 

Hi all,
 
I've a box with rk3228b, nand, ddr2 etc etc and I'm using it as mediacenter with Libreelec 9.2 installed on sdcard.
The box recognize the nand, but I had never been able to install the operating system in it (tried with rkdeveloptool, dd and others but without succes).
Until today, when I've discovered this beautiful tool called multitool
I had to make a few small changes (basically removed offset and gpt creation in the nand flash code), but it works great.
So my question is, it's possible to add an option to write a generic image, in order to make this tool more useful!?
 
Last question, I think that the libreelec bootloader has some trouble when boot from NAND, but it's strange, because I've readed that the multitool one shoud be the same. It's true, or there are some changes that I can apply and retry?!
 
 
Thanks for your hard work.
Michele
 
 
 
 
 

thanks @jock, meanwhile looking at your repo I stole a patch that fixes the boot from nand in my libreelec fork 
 
I have seen that this code has been inserted in recent kernels
 
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/mtd/nand/raw/rockchip-nand-controller.c
 
so maybe in the near future NAND for rockchip should works?!

@markst I understand there is no blame, but the phrase"Technically, rockchip devices cannot be bricked" is followed by a detailed explanation about why this is true.
The whole paragraph is important to read, not just the first few words, in particular you can note:
 
 
Don't know, but it looks to me there are enough warnings

Thank you for the job. I run successfully on H96max rk3318, debian server on emmc
 
 
 

@Huafu
The ground (GND) pin is the most important pin, you must absolutely connect it if you want a reliable result, otherwise you can get varying results starting from occasional garbage, total garbage or even adapter breakage.
If you have a common regular USB serial adapter, +5V is not needed at all and must be kept disconnected.
 
All the three pins (GND, TX and RX) must be connected before giving power to the board and possibly with the serial adapter disconnected from the computer too.
Once the hardware setup is done, you can connect the serial adapter to the computer and configure minicom with the right parameters: usually it is sufficient to keep defaults and change baud rate to 1.5Mbps.
 
Finally you can give power to the board.
 

Hi all,
Little feedback, I tried installing CasaOs, CasaOS - A simple, easy-to-use, elegant open-source Family Cloud system
it works..
It may be useful for some of you.
Thank you to the entire IceWhale team for this sharing..
 
https://github.com/IceWhaleTech/CasaOS
 
 

@Elmojo
I know is not fine answer to a question with another question but in this case
 
comes very natural ask  : why did you modded it ??? Just for fun ? You didn't have a defined purpose in trying linux ?

Anyway, just to answer , in my personal study case I have done on it:
voip pbx ( asterisk)
network nas
network firewall
pihole dns firewall
openvpv, wireguard and tinc vpn
home assistant
volumio
special ip cam monitoring and data acquisition

and I guess I could experiment more..... if only I would study more potential applications

@chinhhut

Try these steps:
1) push the little switch inside the hole while inserting a male-male cable into the otg
2) on another linux machine you should have now a new device (lsusb will help you) and you can run rkdeveloptool
3) rkdeveloptool ld should List Device
4) rkdeveloptool rd 3 should Reset Device into mode 3  ( maskrom )
5) rkdeveloptool db MiniLoaderAll.bin ( of course from your path) should upload a temporary loader to recognize the internal emmc
6) if all is successfull until now you can rkdeveloptool wl 0X0 yourimage.img . This should flash the internal emmc .

DISCLAIMER: very " dangerous" approach , be ready to have the opportunity to short the emmc clock pin to ground to go back into mask rom
 
MiniLoaderAll.zip

@Elmojo
I know is not fine answer to a question with another question but in this case
 
comes very natural ask  : why did you modded it ??? Just for fun ? You didn't have a defined purpose in trying linux ?

Anyway, just to answer , in my personal study case I have done on it:
voip pbx ( asterisk)
network nas
network firewall
pihole dns firewall
openvpv, wireguard and tinc vpn
home assistant
volumio
special ip cam monitoring and data acquisition

and I guess I could experiment more..... if only I would study more potential applications

Wouldn't it be easier to modify Armbian as you want it before installing it in the first place? I don't know how to do it, but example. Download @jock's Armbian, or compile your own. Modify the files on the .iso. write it to the SD card and install it on box 1 without the need to modify it later. Then do it on box 2, box 3, etc.

H96Max+ here.
 
Just installed following your instructions. Works amazingly well and was amazingly easy, particularly after having read around on other forums that for RK3328 there is no HDMI support and that I should have opened the box to get to the serial pins! Thank you all for this great work!
 
I am going to use the device as a micro server, so I am not testing any graphical desktop.  Quite happy to see that USB3, WIFI, Ethernet, all appear to work out of the box.
 
Have just a few questions to which someone having the same box may be able to answer:
 
1. What is the appropriate answers for the EMMC configuration in rk3318-config?
2. What is the appropriate configuration for the LED? I am puzzled by the fact that the led functionality seems to be better in the multitool than in the OS itself. In multitool the red led stays on and the blue one appears to flash to indicate activity. In the OS, the red led stays on all the time and the blue one stays off all the time.  The "conf3" seems to hang the machine at boot.
 
Furthermore, I have a question about the kernel packages.
 
- As instructed, I have put on hold the upgrade of kernel, kernel headers and dtb packages from apt. Is it expected that the official armbian kernel will include rk3318 and rk3328 support in the future? This seems important to me in terms of future maintainability of the box.
 
During the installation, I have dumped my firmware using multitool (an Android 8.something, if I remember properly). Would it be useful if I tried to extract the dtb from it, or is the dtb of the stock H96Max+ already well known to you?
 
A very minor suggestion from someone getting onto this great forum for the first time (hence something that could either be totally useless for naivety or maybe useful as representative of an initial impression, you judge). Threads regarding multiple boxes sharing the same fundamental hardware, such as this one may easily become very large and it is hard and trying to go through them it is sometimes hard to understand if something is general or if it refers to a specific box and if so which one.  Being able to tag the messages with the specific piece of hardware they are about would ease reading immensely.

@chinhhut @curse
The backup made by multitool (and rkdeveloptool) is per nature a full backup of all the physical eMMC sectors. It has no knowledge of the abstract structures like filesystem and files.
The compression gives back a more manageable file which is not the entire size of the eMMC, but up to a few gigabytes, depending on how much data is stored on the eMMC and how much compressible it is.
 
Indeed if you decompress it, you get the whole size of the eMMC, it is expected and it is advisable too. If it is not so, it means the backup process didn't went right.
 
Now should be clear there is a problem about the "blank" part: how we can know if a part is "blank" and not, for example, a piece of a file which just contains a long string of 0x00 bytes? This is crucial: if you say that you skip those parts which are, supposedly, blank, you may (and probably will) fail to restore files that contains long string of 0x00 bytes. You won't get 0x00s in those places, but you will instead find there the contents of the unwritten eMMC sectors.
 
So a full restore of all sectors is essential to restore the exact previous condition when doing a full backup.
 
One helpful thing that may be helpful here is to use the native page erase feature of eMMCs, which is the thing blkdiscard program do and is at the bottom of the famous TRIM feature: flash memories are divided into "pages", ranging from several kilobytes to few megabytes usually.
Erasing those pages using the discard command is very fast, much faster than zero-filling. You can erase all the pages of a whole eMMC in a few seconds, while zero-filling all the pages would require dozens of minutes.
 
Doing an erase with blkdiscard and then restoring the backup skipping the blank parts now becomes sensible!
There is an issue though: discarding pages does not fill them with 0x00 bytes, but with 0xff bytes, so the real blank parts now are not those which contains string of 0x00s but those which contains strings of 0xff bytes. Those may or may be not so common. Surely they are common in non-programmed sectors, but results may vary.
 
As a conclusion: restoring the whole count of eMMC sectors, despite being slower, is surely the simplest and most reliable way!

i'm intrigued, why do poor, elderly people need a linux server? 

!! DEPRECATED !!
Instructions in this thread are oudated and superseded by the new experimental APT repository for hardware video decoding ffmpeg.
Please refer to this thread from now on!
 
Hello, recent upgrades to armbian are regarding kernel 5.15.
I noticed that many v4l2 fixes and enhancements went into this release, so I decided to compile ffmpeg using LibreELEC patched version and mpv over it.
mpv turns out to be statically linked with ffmpeg, so I propose it here for people who is interested in cutting edge kernel and wants to do some tests.
 
This has been tested on Debian Bullseye and Ubuntu Hirsute on following platforms:
Rockchip RK3228/9 (kernel 5.10, 5.14) Rockchip RK3288 (kernel 5.14) Rockchip RK3318/28 (kernel 5.15)  
It should work on allwinner platforms too, but I didn't test it there.
Binaries are built by me on developing boards.
 
The binary for armhf is available here
The binary for arm64 is available here
 
Copy the binary into /usr/local/bin directory of your system (mpv-armhf for 32 bit systems, mpv-arm64 for 64 bit systems):
sudo cp mpv-armhf /usr/local/bin/mpv  
Install dependencies for Debian Bullseye and Ubuntu Hirsute:
apt install libass9 libbluray2 librubberband2 libsdl2-2.0-0 libva-drm2 libva-wayland2 libva-x11-2 libva2 libvdpau1 libx264-160 libx265-192 libxss1 libxv1 libfdk-aac2  
I have had issues with dependencies on Debian Buster/Ubuntu Focal, in particular libx264-160 and libx265-192 are not available there.
I Solved the issue downloading the packages from Debian Bullseye web page and manually installing them.
There may be the need for some other dependency depending upon your actual installation.
 
Run mpv in a virtual terminal (videos up to 4K) with this CLI:
mpv --vo=gpu --hwdec=drm --gpu-hwdec-interop=drmprime-drm --drm-draw-plane=overlay --drm-drmprime-video-plane=primary <video.mp4>  
Mpv can be run in X11 with this other CLI, but due to buffer copying it requires a good CPU - rk3228 and rk3328 won't even play 720p, rk3288 do 720p fine:
mpv --vo=gpu --hwdec=auto-copy --gpu-context=x11egl --gpu-hwdec-interop=drmprime-drm <video.mp4>  
This is an experiment and your mileage may vary a lot:
H.264 codec should be well supported around the boards; H.265 has more limited support VP8 should be generally supported VP9 seems to still require some work.

Update!
 
New testing minimal and xfce desktop debian images are available on first page!
Latest kernel 5.15: plenty of fixes and upgrades for hardware video decoding Initial (and untested) support for boards with sdcard on external controller U-boot v2021.07, should make USB2 boot more reliable To test hardware video decoding capabilities follow this link to a tutorial with prebuilt mpv binary and instructions on how to use it.