McTurbo

I have my RK3399-based device booting with my own working kernel and device tree. I want to erase the root partition and install Debian from one of the official ARM distros, but I'm not sure how to do this. Obviously, I can't just boot into the Debian installer like on an X86 machine. What I think I need is a root partition of a vanilla Debian install, because then I can just point U-boot to the root partition and Debian should boot (hopefully into an installer). What's the best way to proceed?

Thanks so much for your help!

Where is this done? Is this done in the source for the hantro module? If I wanted to experiment by enabling the hantro H.264 decoder, how would I do that? Is this the same patch used by LibreELEC? I have H.264 decoding working, so I definitely want to try this.

I found that the official OrangePi images enable 4:4:4 output, but only with the Debian image. The Ubuntu image only has 4:2:2 output. I couldn't figure out how they did this as I couldn't see any difference in the driver config. So it seems they changed something in the code to get it working, possibly something similar to the patch you linked.

I've noticed that some system images will start the OrangePi with 4:2:2 output on HDMI instead of 4:4:4. This causes artifacts, especially when there's white text on a red background. What's the interface or method to change this? Does this have to be done via U-Boot or can it be done in userspace?

Thanks. Just to be clear, that's the rkvdec from staging drivers, right? It overrides hantro for H.264? Oh and I'm assuming the reason hantro H.264 is disabled is rkvdec offers better performance. Is that right?

Turns out it was a device tree problem. After updating the device tree, I can see the nodes set up by the mainline Rockchip hantro-vpu and rkvdec modules: /dev/video0: rockchip-rga /dev/video1: hantro-vpu (encoder) /dev/video2: hantro-vpu (decoder) /dev/video3: rkvdec

I'm using vl42-ctl to query the kernel directly through ioctls, so these decoders should show. The only other thing is no more than 2 nodes are created: /dev/video0 and /dev/video1. Could it be a udev thing?

I've compiled mainline kernel 6.6 which runs well on my OrangePi/RK3399. The only problem left is getting H.264 decoding working. Unfortunately, when I query /dev/video1 which is the node created by the hantro-vpu driver, only MPEG2 and VP8 are shown as supported codecs for decoding. No H.264, even though I've read many places that the mainline hantro driver supports H.264. Has anyone else had this problem? Is there something else I need to do to get this working?

I've got an OrangePi based on the Rockchip RK3399. The official OrangePi Debian version I'm using is Armbian-based I believe and uses a 5.10 kernel. I want to upgrade the kernel as later ones support some video features of the RK3399 I want to use. The problem is, if I build the kernel using the standard vanilla method from kernel.org sources even using the same config file from the running kernel without changing anything (make olddefconfig), the device won't boot when I symlink the new kernel to /boot/Image. Interestingly, it does boot if I symlink the new initrd to /boot/uInitrd, but only with the old kernel. Is there something special I need to do to the kernel that Armbian expects? Are there required secure keys or anything that u-boot expects that aren't in my new kernel? I thought the problem might be missing kernel patches, but as far as I know RK3399 support is mainlined already, so new kernels should support it. Any help is appreciated!