Taz

1. https://github.com/apritzel/sunxi-fw
2.  "adb reboot bootloader" takes you to fastboot if android boots up, "fastboot" if you are at u-boot terminal. See help for list of u-boot commands, I do not know that much about it but you can feed the list to AI and see if something useful comes up.
 
So to get gpu acceleration going, we need to get this 6.18.19 kernel booted https://github.com/NickAlilovic/build/releases/tag/Radxa-Cubie-A7A-A7Z-A7S-Mainline-V0.1
Have any ideas on why I cannot get any mainline kernels to boot  @Nick A
i tried "setenv bootargs console=ttyS0,115200 earlycon=uart,mmio32,0x02500000,115200 keep_bootcon ignore_loglevel debug clk_ignore_unused"
 

You can find the pinout at https://linux-sunxi.org/MicroSD_Breakout : CD is rx, CLK is tx and GND. There is a risk that using 3.3 v TTL levels on the tf card slot could fry the microsd controller so I would suggest getting the 1.8V version I mentioned earlier.
 
So here is how I boot debian Trixie these days: (still need to figure out how to automate this but I do not know how yet using u-boot)
setenv bootargs console=ttyAS0,115200 root=/dev/sda28 rw rootwait init=/sbin/init clk_ignore_unused sunxi_flash read 4007F000 boot_a sunxi_flash read 4fa00000 dtbo_a fdt addr 0x4fa00000 bootm 4007F000 - 4fa00000  
Or to automagically boot:
setenv bootargs 'console=ttyAS0,115200 root=/dev/sda28 rw rootwait init=/sbin/init clk_ignore_unused' setenv distro_bootcmd 'sunxi_flash read 4007F000 boot_a; sunxi_flash read 4fa00000 dtbo_a; fdt addr 0x4fa00000; bootm 4007F000 - 4fa00000' saveenv  
Write dtb:
dtc -I dtb -O dts -o tablet.dts tablet_patched.dtb dd if=tablet_patched.dtb of=/dev/sda24  status=progress conv=fsync dd if=tablet_patched.dtb of=/dev/sda25  status=progress conv=fsync You need these on host:
sudo apt update sudo apt install debootstrap qemu-user-static
How to prepaire the rootfs which will be flashed to userdata using fastboot:
fallocate -l 8G teclast_trixie.img mkfs.ext4 -b 4096 teclast_trixie.img sudo mount -o loop teclast_trixie.img /mnt/trixie sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/trixie/dev sudo mount --bind /sys /mnt/trixie/sys sudo mount --bind /proc /mnt/trixie/proc sudo debootstrap --arch=arm64 trixie /mnt/trixie http://deb.debian.org/debian sudo chroot /mnt/teclast /bin/bash passwd root echo "t60" > /etc/hostname apt update apt install build-essential kmod # you will need to install bunch of others but not more than 3 GB I think because fastboot wont reliably transfer more exit sudo fastboot erase userdata sudo fastboot flash userdata teclast_trixie.img  
How to do the raxda kernel:
./magiskboot unpack boot.img cp ../../raxda_kernel.img kernel ./magiskboot repack boot.img new_boot.img sudo fastboot flash boot_a new_boot.img sudo fastboot flash boot_b new_boot.img  
Wifi driver is a bit complicated(TBD):
 
modprobe aic8800_bsp modprobe aic8800_fdrv ip link show wlan0  
Here are the stock partitions:
root@t60:~# blkid  /dev/sda26: SEC_TYPE="msdos" UUID="2200-140B" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="vfat" PARTLABEL="media_data" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e5e" /dev/sda22: UUID="dd7fd886-b74f-41cf-a5b1-bf1b47afaf8c" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4" PARTLABEL="treadahead" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e5a" /dev/sda1: SEC_TYPE="msdos" LABEL="Volumn" BLOCK_SIZE="512" TYPE="vfat" PARTLABEL="bootloader_a" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e45" /dev/sda23: SEC_TYPE="msdos" UUID="4019-0FB8" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="vfat" PARTLABEL="private" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e5b" /dev/sda21: UUID="a5aa7e72-84f0-40c4-9693-2a2ad5896309" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4" PARTLABEL="metadata" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e59" /dev/sda28: UUID="f84bc812-d087-4cba-a90f-d045d40d2e44" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4" PARTLABEL="userdata" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e60" /dev/sda4: PARTLABEL="env_b" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e48" /dev/sda16: PARTLABEL="vbmeta_system_b" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e54" /dev/sda2: PARTLABEL="bootloader_b" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e46" /dev/sda24: PARTLABEL="dtbo_a" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e5c" /dev/sda14: PARTLABEL="vbmeta_b" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e52" /dev/sda12: PARTLABEL="misc" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e50" /dev/sda9: PARTLABEL="init_boot_a" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e4d" /dev/sda20: PARTLABEL="empty" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e58" /dev/sda10: PARTLABEL="init_boot_b" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e4e" /dev/sda7: PARTLABEL="vendor_boot_a" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e4b" /dev/sda19: PARTLABEL="frp" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e57" /dev/sda5: PARTLABEL="boot_a" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e49" /dev/sda27: PARTLABEL="pstore" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e5f" /dev/sda17: PARTLABEL="vbmeta_vendor_a" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e55" /dev/sda3: PARTLABEL="env_a" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e47" /dev/sda25: PARTLABEL="dtbo_b" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e5d" /dev/sda15: PARTLABEL="vbmeta_system_a" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e53" /dev/sda13: PARTLABEL="vbmeta_a" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e51" /dev/sda11: PARTLABEL="super" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e4f" /dev/sda8: PARTLABEL="vendor_boot_b" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e4c" /dev/sda6: PARTLABEL="boot_b" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e4a" /dev/sda18: PARTLABEL="vbmeta_vendor_b" PARTUUID="a0085546-4166-744a-a353-fca9272b8e56"  
tablet.dts

Howdy. if you have the tf uart adapter thingy, by the time it shows that on screen you are at the u-boot prompt where you can do what you want. e.g. start fastboot. I believe this tablet cannot be bricked because you can always enter FEL mode and use phoenixsuit. It can be maddeningly difficult to phoenixsuit to flash cold tablet but i recall it was like this: press and hold vol+ and power, plug usb cable with phoenixsuite ready to flash. release power button and vol+ few seconds later.

Had to debootstrap trixie because depmod version mismatch. Wifi 2.4 + 5 GHz + BT headphones, keyboards all work. USB is still stuck in plain charge, no micro SD. According to Gemini 3.1 Pro which I have been using, Imagination Technologies (PowerVR) BXM-4-64 MC1 would need 6.12.x kernel or newer which I have not been able to boot yet. This actually feels a bit faster than the Teclast Android even though without accel youtubes playback is quite slow. Battery life probably 5+ hours.
 
aliexpress.com/item/1005009649297050.html keyboard + touchpad I have is a bit shady miss-clicks a bit once in a while. Might have to AI haxor some software filter to get it behave a bit better but that should not be that big of a deal. I have kind of already made up my mind, this ain't going to boot Android anymore, have to see if I grab another one at some point.
 

Okay slight update, I have successfully booted https://forum.armbian.com/topic/56130-radxa-cubie-a7aa7z-allwinner-a733 linux 6.6.98-vendor-sun60iw2 kernel and debootstrapped Bookworm (Debian 12) on it using userdata as root fs.

Basically I got in using:
aliexpress.com/item/1005009243708714.html Micro SD Sniffer
aliexpress.com/item/1005010529282186.html in 1.8v mode(important!)

And fiddling with the u-boot endlessly after i first sabotaged the auto-boot process.
Display is alive, usb subsystem does not work, does not probe. Wifi would be next so I can ditch the tf uart. All your bases belong to us, resistance is futile!

I use Q96 Max to run Pi-hole, Home Assistant in supervised mode, WireGuard, NFS, qBittorrent and Apache. I have openwrt box setup so that it redirects all outgoing DNS to my Pi-hole instance, and since I have wireguard on my phone, I get zero advertisement even on google apps.

Two days of uptime on X88 pro using original power supply and the AP6330 wifi crashed again flooding dmesg with "err=-110". https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2105.3/05569.html goes into some detail about -110. "rmmod cfg80211 brcmfmac && modprobe brcmfmac" caused firmware loading error. So is this limited to X88 pro or all AP6330 I do not know. However since this a hard to reproduce bug there probably isn't much that can be done to actually fix it. I've been using MT7601U usb wifi module that landed on my hands for 5 days without issues. I measured about 600mA current draw on these devices under load so the power supply should be fine I guess. Using MT7601U it takes about 100mA more than with AP6330. I haven't bothered to measure but MT7601U feels about as fast AP6330.

Removing this made it work however I had an kernel oops on the legacy kernel and it soon after that stopped booting.
I tried reinstalling kernel by booting from tf card:
mkdir -p /tmp/emmc mount /dev/mmcblk2p1 /tmp/emmc/ mount --bind /dev/ /tmp/emmc/dev/ mount --bind /proc/ /tmp/emmc/proc/ mount --bind /sys/ /tmp/emmc/sys/ chroot /tmp/emmc/ #ping 8.8.8.8 should now work on chrooted env apt remove linux-image-legacy-rockchip64 apt-get install linux-image-current-rockchip64 it seems to have worked but I have not bothered uart to see what is going on.
5.15.68-rockchip64 is the only kernel I get hdmi with others are blank IIRC.
I was able to get home assistant supervised working perfectly(esphome, tasmota, integrated mqtt server) if I select raspberrypi as machine type. Raspberry pi 4 and tinker I tried failed.
Armbian 22.11.0-trunk Jammy is the only one with docker-ce per https://github.com/home-assistant/supervised-installer and one needs to repackage homeassistant-supervised.deb:
dpkg-deb -R homeassistant-supervised.deb content sed -i "s/os-agent/os-agent:armhf/" content/DEBIAN/control dpkg-deb --build content/ homeassistant-supervised_new.deb dpkg --install homeassistant-supervised_new.deb  

I also get picture reliably at boot up hdmi with testing Kernel 5.19.15 image.  Seems I have messed something up on the buster because Xorg does not start:
https://pastebin.com/p8cRSF5L
 
But does the debian bullseye image still have U-Boot SPL 2022.04-armbian (Aug 23 2022 - 17:04:26 +0300) with that rather apparent "voltage select" bug?
 
I get:
[ 108.358432] ff000000.i2s-i2s-hifi: soc_pcm_open() failed (-22) [ 108.361402] hdmi-audio-codec hdmi-audio-codec.3.auto: Only one simultaneous stream supported! [ 108.362178] hdmi-audio-codec hdmi-audio-codec.3.auto: ASoC: error at snd_soc_dai_startup on i2s-hifi: -22 On the Home assistant image

@oolonthegreat @uehqsvbm Do not get too attached to devices that refuse to cooperate after a reasonable amount of effort. Just sell it and recover what you can and get one that people have had better success with. I recently fell into this trap with one particular openwrt supported device I have already spent months on it.
 

@uehqsvbm
It could be that those three pins near ir receiver are just reversed order of ir receiver. I have seen similar designs. They just put multiple pads for different devices. I hear they are going to start doing more of that in future because of chip shortage. You can first the all the pins with a multimeter so that it is below 3.3v but I do not think this board has uart unfortunately. I guess if multiboot works you could get the sources and try to make it into something workable and find out what is wrong that way. Or build from sources and change as many things as possible and see if you get lucky. Actually the best option might be to configure uart TX pin on the led pin or one of the pins of the front led panel or ir receiver. I am pretty sure rk3318 chip is capable of that and I think I saw the full datasheet online. I do think the 1.5Mps uart is little risky high which can cause signal integrity problems.
 
@jock
Can you tell me where this blinking led is configured, it is now shining through the case and I do not like keeping anything that blinks in the house.
 
 
I have not been able to crash my box at 1.3ghz and performance governor with fan cooling. Might give a whirl to overclocking with voltage mod but do not know how yet.

It appears it does not matter when you plug in HDMI cable. But for 3d printer owners out there I made a parametric cooler case(well top of it anyway)
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5447782
Certainly sorts out the overheating issue for the time being. Tested with cpuburn-a53
ln -s /sys/devices/virtual/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp /root/temp; cat /root/temp  

So I build a minimal image from sources with Armbian 22.08.0-trunk Bullseye with Linux 5.15.58-rockchip64 and burned it with multitool without erasing emmc this time.
Connected sigrok-pico to uart tx line and pulseview at 3mhz and 100M samples uart protocol decoder. It was a bit of a pain using a logic analyzer first time but I found a login prompt and so replaced sigrok-pico with ch340g usb uart and was able to login and create account without any issue this time. No wifi so I just stuck ethernet cable to my router and dhcp gave ip address to it. I connected hdmi and now that works as well. It seems that only 2gb of 4gb ram is detected but I can see that this kind of issues has been discussed before on this thread.

So to sum it up, it seems 5.18 kernel has no hdmi but if you stick ethernet cable to a dhcp capable router one can get the ip and ssh into it - you probably want to use 5.15 kernel for the time being though. Perhaps something along the lines of git-bisect to get to the bottom of the hdmi issue. I do find it a bit strange that hdmi did not seem to work immediately after flashing. Perhaps one needs to replug the hdmi cable after it has booted.
 
Feel like a winner already, thanks to everyone working on this!
 

So I build a minimal image from sources with Armbian 22.08.0-trunk Bullseye with Linux 5.15.58-rockchip64 and burned it with multitool without erasing emmc this time.
Connected sigrok-pico to uart tx line and pulseview at 3mhz and 100M samples uart protocol decoder. It was a bit of a pain using a logic analyzer first time but I found a login prompt and so replaced sigrok-pico with ch340g usb uart and was able to login and create account without any issue this time. No wifi so I just stuck ethernet cable to my router and dhcp gave ip address to it. I connected hdmi and now that works as well. It seems that only 2gb of 4gb ram is detected but I can see that this kind of issues has been discussed before on this thread.

So to sum it up, it seems 5.18 kernel has no hdmi but if you stick ethernet cable to a dhcp capable router one can get the ip and ssh into it - you probably want to use 5.15 kernel for the time being though. Perhaps something along the lines of git-bisect to get to the bottom of the hdmi issue. I do find it a bit strange that hdmi did not seem to work immediately after flashing. Perhaps one needs to replug the hdmi cable after it has booted.
 
Feel like a winner already, thanks to everyone working on this!
 

It appears it does not matter when you plug in HDMI cable. But for 3d printer owners out there I made a parametric cooler case(well top of it anyway)
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5447782
Certainly sorts out the overheating issue for the time being. Tested with cpuburn-a53
ln -s /sys/devices/virtual/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp /root/temp; cat /root/temp  

It appears it does not matter when you plug in HDMI cable. But for 3d printer owners out there I made a parametric cooler case(well top of it anyway)
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5447782
Certainly sorts out the overheating issue for the time being. Tested with cpuburn-a53
ln -s /sys/devices/virtual/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp /root/temp; cat /root/temp  

So I build a minimal image from sources with Armbian 22.08.0-trunk Bullseye with Linux 5.15.58-rockchip64 and burned it with multitool without erasing emmc this time.
Connected sigrok-pico to uart tx line and pulseview at 3mhz and 100M samples uart protocol decoder. It was a bit of a pain using a logic analyzer first time but I found a login prompt and so replaced sigrok-pico with ch340g usb uart and was able to login and create account without any issue this time. No wifi so I just stuck ethernet cable to my router and dhcp gave ip address to it. I connected hdmi and now that works as well. It seems that only 2gb of 4gb ram is detected but I can see that this kind of issues has been discussed before on this thread.

So to sum it up, it seems 5.18 kernel has no hdmi but if you stick ethernet cable to a dhcp capable router one can get the ip and ssh into it - you probably want to use 5.15 kernel for the time being though. Perhaps something along the lines of git-bisect to get to the bottom of the hdmi issue. I do find it a bit strange that hdmi did not seem to work immediately after flashing. Perhaps one needs to replug the hdmi cable after it has booted.
 
Feel like a winner already, thanks to everyone working on this!