bholland

They estimated a 6 month to 12 month development cycle to get the libdrm and the libmali drivers working with the 3328. Right now, there is absolutely no support for their drivers, playback doesn't work, and they are working on getting Chromium working. It is a real shame. Their drivers are built for the 3288 and the 3399 boards, which are entirely different from the 3288. The last I read about this, there was a musing from the kernel community about getting drm and mali support baked into the kernel for these boards. I doubt that went anywhere. I also cannot fathom why they would custom build xorg. That seems like far more trouble than it was worth. As is, this board is a really kick ass headless server and within a year, I suspect that the Rpi4 will blow it out of the water and have omxplayer.

Oh. And one last really stupid and trivial question. Should I pull from this git repo rather than the firefly ones? Thanks!

Awesome! Thank you so much. I am a bit surprised that open source drivers haven't made it into the stable kernel yet. This was exactly what I was afraid of. I noticed in the kernel options that Rockchip as a type of ARM was natively supported but I didn't think about dedicated drivers. Given this, I will have to revert back to the 4.4.114 kernel. Am I missing anything really important between the 4.4 and the 4.15 branch? That question might be too complex or too unknown but thank you. This is hugely helpful. I have some more reading to do.

Hi All, I am not new to kernel building. I have been building kernels since the early days of Gentoo. Kernels on boards however, is something a bit different. I have an roc-rk3328-cc but this would be applicable to a variety of boards. Right now Firefly has their 4.* kernel at 4.4.114. I guess at some point that was what they went with. The current kernel is at about 4.15.14. I couldn't figure out how to patch from 4.4.114 to 4.15.14 (if you could provide help with that, please do so) so I downloaded the tarball and extracted it into the firefly's git directory. What should have happened was any kernel related file got updated to 4.15.14 but none of the configuration files were overwritten. It seems like firmware gets baked into the system image later and firefly provides the SoC+firmware anyway. I made the kernel last night and everything seemed to compile. I even have modules, though I am still at a loss for how to install modules within a u-boot system. Anyway. Did I do something incredibly stupid that will result in an unstable kernel for my board or was this a more reasonable set of steps to take? Thanks!

Hello all, I wrote up this documentation mostly as notes to myself about how I successfully built a kernel and ubuntu core rootfs. If you could let me know how to improve it, please let me know. I don't generally write documentation. I focused on the roc-rk3328-cc but it should work okay for a variety of the Firefly chips. Thanks, ~Ben barebone_to_ubunutu.md

I don't know what you mean by this. I can look at how they make the u-boot image when I get home tonight. I guess also, if it runs, it could be running in DDR3 mode rather than DDR4.

Oh cool. I don't know how that works with their setup. If possible, do you mind if I put together a document and have you take a look at how to get the thing into your system? It isn't easy mostly because Firefly has all of their stuff scripted out. I think it is all the same, but going from bare metal to something usable is unfamiliar territory for me. For the ubuntu core image, I followed http://docs.khadas.com/social/BuildUbuntuRootfsViaUbuntuBase/ but didn't need to create a boot image since Firefly uses u-boot and provides a method to get from a compiled kernel to something bootable. This is very raw. It basically provides a command line. I have almost no experience building out a functional and friendly OS but that just depends on whatever package sets you would want to have installed. Their kernel script is really strange. They basically do: cd (kernel directory) make firefly_kernel_version make -j8 cd (build directory) They don't build any modules and when I tried building them out, I couldn't figure out where they went.

I have an ubuntu core build working with their 4.4.114 kernel. I am going to write up documentation tonight. I don't know how to test if the DDR4 works as intended but it did have the ethernet kernel module. Their kernel is weird. It doesn't have modules. Everything is baked into a single small kernel. I want to get an automated build environment set up for it. It wasn't easy following 4 different documents. I want something a bit more streamlined. Out of curiosity, do you happen to know of a list of packages that goes from an Ubuntu or Debian minimal build to something with a decent UI?

Hello all, I have something that you might find useful. I created an image for the Ubuntu 16.04 core for the firefly roc-rk3328-cc board. I followed the firefly docs to compile the firefly 4.4.114 kernel and build out the u-boot image. I followed this guide http://docs.khadas.com/social/BuildUbuntuRootfsViaUbuntuBase/ to get the ubuntu rootfs. I then created a disk image with the u-boot kernel, ubunutu rootfs, and the SoC. It actually worked. This is a very minimal install to the point where I have to modify the rootfs guide above to include the eth0 interface and probably install the network-manager. I am going to write up documentation and exactly what I did tonight. Does anyone know of a particularly good location to place the images and particularly good message boards to get this out? Also, is there a decent guide on how to go from ubuntu core to a desktop with a GUI? Currently, this is a minimal working example rootfs, which I think is particularly useful for this community. I couldn't find an ubuntu rootfs for use with a u-boot board anywhere. The primary driver for this was to get OpenVPN support and iptables support for this device. The firefly image for ubuntu does not have TUN or xtables support built into the kernel. Mine should, but I still need to test that functionality. After I write up the documentation, I could probably figure out how to automate this via a series of shell scripts. Would that interest anyone? Thanks, ~Ben

I don't mean to bring up a dead thread but I just got mine. The kernel doesn't have the options that I would like to see so I have to recompile and reimage ubuntu. (Aside, any good sources to figure out what to do with a compiled kernel, merge it with I guess u-boot?) I am trying to go through their tutorials and I am finding it very difficult so I just wanted to make sure that I didn't have to enable anything strange to get the DDR4 or the gig ethernet working at the kernel level. I have to say though, this card is a beast. Thanks!