Alex83

@xaleks
First there is no A to Z guide how to make this android to linux box , because there are many diffirence between the box . feel free to write one
 
Download link to the Armbian version I need to try and dtbs I should attempt to use?
somewhere in this thread armbian.com/linux/balbes  ( last 3 pages)
 
How to boot from the SD card (I assume this is the tooth pick method)?
toothpick is only to get to recovery partition / recovery tool
you also have to find a way to install the aml_autoscript , this script activte the multiboot option on bootloader for usb and sd-card boot
( i had to sideload TWRP from sd-card to  temporary recovery and than replace recovery with twrp, install the aml_autoscript and also root the box)
 
 
 
Where to solder a uart bridge (I'm using my bus pirate for this) for uart?
look at the lower section on your picture. Are there the mark for RX;TX and GND ?  maybe look at the other side of the board !  ; What is a bus pirate ? you need a uart rs232 to usb ( be aware you need maybe 3,3V UART adapter )  that enough,
 
dtb
there are some in the armbian boot section for testing , there is also a mxii.dtb

hi and welcome
 
there is no a to z guide how to get linux to the box because like i wrote before therer a big mix of diffirent boxes ( 3 diffferent wifi chip , 3 or 4 different Lan chip) also most of the armbian community only work with and on open source or community Software.
 
ubuntu is a linux
armbian is ubuntu linux or debian linux with tools and setup for small space envoirments
 
 
its possible to run this box as a slow NAS ( only USB2 support ; most of the box only has 2.4GHz Wlan N ) ; Plex or Media box still a problem because the media recode is not optimal ( lag of graphic driver)
 
 
i thing on page 24...26 i wrote some steps  ( but feel free to write a guide ) be
 
balbes150 has stop his work on this Amlogic Armbian release but there are some work on the linux Kernel for AMLOGIC chipset but its slow .
 
 
there are 3 main steps
1. get the bootloader unlock for multiboot with the aml_autoscript.zip from Android or from TWRP
2. get the armbian on a SD-Card (  beleanerEtcher or ImageWrite32 )
3 get the right setup to boot linux ( dtb files)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

@rlukas210

yes your board is well known and also quite good supported.
I am happy and satisfied it is working now

@jock @fabiobassa hi after a long time!
I have spent many hours, tried several times, blá blá blá
After all, i got my board to work both with USB, and tried with Debian Image and nand was booted Fine!
 
I would like to give a huge thank you to you and everyone who could make this possible! 😁😁😁
 
edit:
 
I can't attach the images here, but in the link below has the proof and the df output
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=1VJeOQczDYVTannltNl4cq0wk6WtvWokI
One more time, a big thank for u'all!! 

Very cool product, 3568 in action

I would take one

whoohoo!! solved: No Wifi Tanix TX92
 
I did all the heavy lifting on this. Please incorporate changes in build (if you want), including the firmware
    patch from https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-wireless/msg190482.html
    to patch/kernel/aml-s9xxx-current/qca9377_hw1.1.patch
    on target:
        hint: https://github.com/erstrom/linux-ath/issues/9
        cd /tmp; git clone -b bd-sdmac https://github.com/erstrom/ath10k-firmware.git
        mkdir /lib/firmware/ath10k; cp -rf ath10k-firmware/QCA9887/ /lib/firmware/ath10k
        cp /lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA9377/hw1.0/firmware-5.bin_WLAN.TF.1.0-00267-1 /lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA9377/hw1.0/firmware-5.bin
        cp /lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA9377/hw1.0/untested/firmware-sdio-5.bin_WLAN.TF.1.1.1-00061-QCATFSWPZ-1 /lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA9377/hw1.0/firmware-sdio-5.bin
 
Regards;
Bill
qca9377_hw1.1.patch

@Alex83 I have no experience with tvheadend, I don't even know what it is. It looks to me that the error is somehow related to bad architecture.
Try to post a question in the general chit chat forum on how to compile it for armhf if it is your necessity.

OHHHH and finally here it goes 

Bravo Alex, but more bravo Jock

@Alex83
Very good! I'm very pleased to read that finally we got the best out of the board
The wifi benchmark is excellent for a 72Mbit/s link,I'm not totally sure the chip is able to establish 40 Mhz links, I think it is a single stream chip so that is the maximum you can get from it, but nonetheless it is quite above the benchmarks I did in the past that were around 37Mbit/s.
 
Thanks again for the patience, now I go to put credits on first page and a link to the instructions for people who wants to upgrade the NAND bootloader

Ahah, no wait a second. I just spotted a mistake in the instructions!
The rkdeveloptool ef is removing again the bootloader you just installed sorry for that... (I'm going to fix them)
 
Let's try again:
Unplug the USB cable Plug the USB cable run upgrade_tool Wait for a minute Unplug the USB cable Then finally it should work as expected
 
edit: going to give you credits on first page if this madness works

Ok, so let's see if I understood:
you plug the USB cable lsusb is telling that the device is there if you run rkdeveloptool rd 3 it tells you "Reset Device failed!"  
If so, believe it or not this is the best condition
 
Repeat the procedure starting from upgrade_tool, hope this time works
 
 

@Alex83 Don't worry, your board won't become trash, you can always use the Android tool for windows to restore NAND functionality as you did in the past.
 
Tell me if things are working better with the v2.51 and v2.47 loaders, in the meantime I try to craft a new bootloader combining them with the 660 Mhz ddrbin so you could try them to get the best out the hardware.
Please have patience (as you see, that's very messy getting things working with these boards...)

Just use the multitool to backup your current installation if you want to. We are going to erase everything on the NAND so if you want to keep the content just do a quick backup.
I suggest you to install from scratch, but if you spent time to do some configurations you don't want to lose again, the multitool will make your life easier.
 
What you need:
from the ilmich/rkflashtool you need to clone/download the repository and compile the binary using the instructions there.  
The procedure (if you are already in maskrom mode, go directly to step 8):
Do the backup using the Multitool Do "Erase Flash" using the Multitool Unplug the power cord, detach all unnecessary things: no network, no hdmi, no sdcard, no power cord and no USB things; if serial adapter is attached, keep only ground and TX wires (stock bootloader uses 1.5mbps speed) Connect the USB male-to-male cable to the computer and then to the USB OTG port of the box The box should turn on automatically, you should see a device with ID 2207:320b running lsusb command Erase the flash bootloader: invoke the command rkflashtool e 0 8192 and wait a few seconds Now we have to put the the board in maskrom mode: unplug the USB cable, wait a few seconds and replug the USB cable. If you don't see anything on serial adapter and the device is listed in lsusb, you are in maskrom mode! As an alternative to unplug/replug, you can also run rkflashtool b 3, but it is preferred to do a power cycle. If you have a serial adapter attached, depending on the loader, you may need to set the speed to 1500000bps or 115200bps to see the box output. Upload the loader to the board: rkflashtool l bin/rk322x_loader_v1.10.238_256.bin Update the loader on the board: rkflashtool a bin/rk322x_loader_v1.10.238_256.bin Unplug the USB cable Done!  
If you are at step 9 and rkflashtool is stuck at "info: send ddrbin vendor code", do a power cycle and use the alternative 1T bootloader: bin/rk322x_loader_v1.10.238_256_1t.bin
You can now restore the backup using the multitool (or do a new installation).
 
Note: I also attached to this post a couple of known working bootloaders in case the one I suggested above does not work and you need to restore back the functionality of your board.
Use them if the one above does not work.
 
 
RK322XMiniLoaderAll_V2.51_spectek_en_ddr2_rd_odt_180703.bin RK322XMiniLoaderAll_V2.47_spectek_en_ddr2_rd_odt_171127.bin

I think neither ubuntu nor debian installs some firewall rules by default. I have debian on my NAS and I don't either have iptables installed, so I guess no firewall rules are installed by default on my box.
 
 
This is the result of a straightforward iperf3 run on my NAS box:
paolo@nas:~$ iperf3 -c localhost -t 60 -i 5 Connecting to host localhost, port 5201 [ 5] local 127.0.0.1 port 43690 connected to 127.0.0.1 port 5201 ^Y[ ID] Interval Transfer Bitrate Retr Cwnd [ 5] 0.00-5.00 sec 964 MBytes 1.62 Gbits/sec 0 767 KBytes [ 5] 5.00-10.00 sec 971 MBytes 1.63 Gbits/sec 0 1.69 MBytes [ 5] 10.00-15.01 sec 852 MBytes 1.43 Gbits/sec 0 2.56 MBytes [ 5] 15.01-20.00 sec 935 MBytes 1.57 Gbits/sec 0 2.56 MBytes [ 5] 20.00-25.00 sec 966 MBytes 1.62 Gbits/sec 0 2.56 MBytes [ 5] 25.00-30.00 sec 962 MBytes 1.62 Gbits/sec 0 2.56 MBytes [ 5] 30.00-35.00 sec 966 MBytes 1.62 Gbits/sec 0 2.56 MBytes [ 5] 35.00-40.00 sec 968 MBytes 1.62 Gbits/sec 0 2.56 MBytes [ 5] 40.00-45.01 sec 966 MBytes 1.62 Gbits/sec 0 2.56 MBytes [ 5] 45.01-50.00 sec 939 MBytes 1.58 Gbits/sec 0 2.56 MBytes [ 5] 50.00-55.00 sec 964 MBytes 1.62 Gbits/sec 0 2.56 MBytes [ 5] 55.00-60.00 sec 960 MBytes 1.61 Gbits/sec 0 2.56 MBytes - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [ ID] Interval Transfer Bitrate Retr [ 5] 0.00-60.00 sec 11.1 GBytes 1.60 Gbits/sec 0 sender [ 5] 0.00-60.01 sec 11.1 GBytes 1.60 Gbits/sec receiver I got a much better result of 1.6 gbit/s and two cores were at 100%, one core was hogged by iperf3 client instance and the other one by iperf3 server instance. Can't see any way to use more threads with iperf3
 
The fact is, as I think already stated previously, that you are just stressing the local network stack, so mostly you are moving chunks of data from a memory location into another memory location, with the added overhead of linux network stack code. That's all, it does not reflect the real performance of the hardware because no network hardware is in use.
 
Moreover, with such kind of benchmark mostly you are benchmarking the SoC memory subsystem and its throughput.
Boxes come in two memory flavours mostly:
DDR2 in 32 bit configurations DDR3 in 16 bit configurations DDR2 chips usually are 333 Mhz (rarely 400 Mhz) parts, and DDR3 memory chips usually are 667 Mhz (often 800) parts.
Both are initialized at 330 Mhz during the very first boot stage, so in this condition (both at 330Mhz) the bandwidth of the DDR2 memories is twice the DDR3 memories (note: I don't consider the access timings here for simplicity)
 
Despite being installed with half the bus, DDR3 memories support runtime reclocking via DDR Memory Controller (DMC) kernel driver: they usually can be reclocked up to 800 Mhz, depending on the load. The DMC is disabled in armbian for a good reason: memory chips have different access timings and memories have different configurations, so having a one-for-all configuration and guarantee system stability is hard if ever possible.
 
The good news is that the bootloader (actually a piece of it called ddrbin) that is shipped with armbian is configured to boot DDR2 at 330 Mhz and DDR3 at 660 Mhz, so both kind of memories are mostly on par with bandwidth. The ddrbin is a proprietary rockchip 10 kbytes closed-source blob (bad thing), but is able to autodetect the memory timings (called training) for optimal performance (good thing).
 
Here comes your situation: since you have a NAND flash, the bootloader part is not accessible to the linux kernel rknand driver. For this and other reasons, the bootloader on NAND can't be updated using the multitool or via generic linux, so you are stuck with the original bootloader that initializes the memories at ~330 Mhz (some ddrbin are configured even as low as 300 Mhz).
 
Since you are ultimately benchmarking your memory, the number of 670 mbit/s is a quite good approximation of your memory bandwidth. If I do some rough calculations, supposing your bootloader initializes your DDR3 memories at 300 Mhz, based upon my benchmark and yours, I get this number:
 
1600 (mbit/s, my benchmark result) * 0.5 (16bit DDR3 vs 32bit DDR2 bus ratio) * 0.9 (your 300Mhz DDR3 / my 330Mhz DDR2 ratio) = 727 mbit/s
 
which is roughly the number you get from your benchmark (still I'm not considering memory timings, neither CPU frequency, which may explain the little lower benchmark figure you get). Now this number is just some guessing; it may be totally invented number, since I don't really know your hardware.
 
About the comparison against Orange Pi PC, that's a different platform with different memories, a different memory controller (this is very important!) and probably a totally different kernel configuration, so comparison is very hard. I guess it has DDR3 800 Mhz chips to, but I have no time to check mine now. Yet if there is room for improvement (like the 4-core usage vs. 2-core usage) I'll dip my nose into
 
I hope this lengthy post clarified some dark corners about your iperf3 benchmark.
 

Try to follow this steps and ask there for S905 support 
 
Link to discussion about S905 devices

@Alex83 @tediwildan I checked the issue with apt-get upgrade and actually it happens only on NAND boards due to some misbehaving code in armbian. I'm fixing the issue, in the meantime you can plug an sdcard in the sd slot and then run apt-get upgrade: the presence of the sdcard in the slot is sufficient to avoid the issue and the upgrade should install fine.

@jock
@fabiobassa

Dpkg: error processing package linux-image-legacy-rk322x (--configure) : installed linux-image-legacy-rk322x package post-installation scripts subprocess returned error exit status 1

Errors were encountered while processing :

linux-image-legacy-rk322x 
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)


It always happen when I try to

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

My board rk3229 Mxq pro 4k NAND


Hope it can fix soon

Sent from my SM-C9000 using Tapatalk

@nokirunner

this was exactly the same question when I approached to linux study on those devices:

well . thanks to study and many people that explained to me now I know that linux IS NOT android and the opposite is also true, and YES they violate the GPL but if you are able to go in China to yell on this, well buy a ticket for me too.
In case of wifi they don't violate any since is proprietary driver and nowhere is written that they must open the code to every one

the desktop subsystem is perfect on Android with all jingles and bells, now you take the SAME kernel they use, the same modules and libraries they have in rootfs  and NO!!!  it doesn't work at the same manner under linux,  and since we must adapt something to linux phylosophy and we HAVEN'T documentation sometimes at all, sometimes half-half , I truly believe that is quite  a  miracle we have a true linux platform on those devices

sadly to admit it but this is the truth

Analog sound is not yet in mainline kernel, it works only on 4.4.
Hardware acceleration also is still partial on mainline kernel and it is in heavy work in progress by LibreELEC and kernel teams.
For multimedia features I suggest to stay on kernel 4.4 for now

Ok situation is clear now... turned out that while cleaning up things for mainline inclusion I made a separate branch (rk3229-squash) and by mistake removed the OPTEE binary blob from that Stupid u-boot, during compilation, did not say anything about the missing file... You instead most probably cloned the rk3229 branch which was perfectly fine.
 
If you are testing the image from sdcard it works fine because the good bootloader that is getting engaged in the eMMC. But don't burn the new image in the eMMC, or the safe bootloader will vanish!
 
I'm recompiling things right now, so the balance to the force will be restored soon

Not sure if this is related... Today I cloned the build scripts from https://github.com/armbian/build and created a legacy Ubuntu desktop image for CSC RK322x. Everything worked well and I only had to use Multitool again to install the NAND bootloader (previously I had the Debian test image from 2 days ago installed via StepNAND). After the bootloader reinstall it booted straight from the sdcard. Armbian-config works etc...
 
I have to say this is a major milestone and well done @jock and team!

Currently you can keep up-to-date the distribution packages via regular apt-get update && apt-get upgrade but not the kernel, u-boot and loader.
When I will merge the fork into mainline armbian (which will happen very soon), you will get also kernel and loaders updates!
 

Hi @Mark Khevin Rogacion, what worked for me multiple times from complete soft bricked state (once I did rkdeveloptool ef and the other time was when I wrote a legacy image to my NAND) was with AndroidTool 2.51 and a copy of the original firmware. Key is the workable firmware and watch out for whether it is NAND or eMMC. 
 
As long as you can get the device to be USB recognized you should be fine. In some cases you would need to press the reset switch inside the AV port, but in a worst case scenario you would need to short the NAND or eMMC pin. I found a picture on which chip and pins to short on forum.freaktab.com. From my attempts, I could not get the firmware to install via rkdeveloptool once I destroyed the bootloader, it showed completed but did not boot.
 
Hi @jock, @fabiobassa, @knaerzche, just wanted to say a very very big thank you for your work. This has certainly kept me sane and entertained during these crazy times, as well as busy.
 
If you want me to try anything, I have 2 x Scishion V88 4K RK3229 (MX4VR-01) devices with NAND and I am okay to go experiment with losing my bootloader :-)

we hope that we will have more luck with the opensource gpu drivers in the near future ... everything will have to go through a mesa-opengl acceleration, including video ... va-api or samething