I spent some time with this board yesterday. Here are my initial impressions:
PROs:
- Using 32GB eMMC from Pine64 the system is very usable (quick). I have not tested with a NVMe SSD yet.
- As @tkaiser has mentioned, the tall heatsink is easily up the task of keeping the RK3399 SOC cool.
Questions/Remarks/CONs:
- The power on behavior seems intermittent. Specific example: Flash image to eMMC using Etcher, install eMMC, connect power... nothing... press Power, Reset,... nothing. Remove power, re-apply power... board boots. Have others experienced this?
- Upgrading to the latest Kernels using the method described above by @tkaiser causes the board to have no HDMI output on reboot (I did not have UART connected). I tried two kernel builds from yesterday. Had to refresh eMMC, very time consuming.
- So, is there a stable kernel 4.14, 4.17, or 4.18 you guys would recommend?
- I can not get a USB wifi card to come up. This is a v1 TL-WN722N which is supported by ath9k. Shows up in "lsusb", I load the ath9k module, reboot, ath9k is not reloaded. I add ath9k to /etc/modules, reboot and it loads on boot. Still nothing in iwconfig. I tried adding "wifi.scan-rand-mac-address=no" to NetworkManager.conf, no help. dmesg does not show firmware being requested, and the information is a little odd. It shows as "USB NIC" and serial number "12345". Same behavior on USB 3.0 and 2.0 ports. (This USB NIC has been plug and play on all sorts of things including Android for years.) I feel like I am missing something obvious. Any ideas?
- How should the "RECOVERY" button be used? There is not information at "http://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/ROCKPro64_Main_Page#Datasheets_for_Components_and_Peripherals" The item is labeled as "28" in a picture, but not in the table below the picture. Would this make it possible to flash the eMMC like on the ROCK64? I do not like pulling it off the board over and over.
Thanks!