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I have successfully gotten Armbian to boot from a USB flash drive on the Rock64 board. Followed ayufan's instructions on how to update SPI Flash with his boot code and then wrote the Armbian Rock64 image to a USB flash drive. All worked as expected. Thanks to everyone at Armbian for all the great work!

Hi, I just ordered a Rock64 with 4GB and wanted to hear your recommendations on what image and os I should run it with. I want to use it as my home server with Docker, Samba, Pi-hole, Tvheadend and Tinyproxy. 100 Mbit/s ethernet is enough. What do you recommend?

Hello guys, does anyone activated CVBS output on Rock64 board? After a short look into datasheet Rock64 should support 480i and 576i. Many thanks.

Hi Guys, I bought a new Rock64 and try to connect a CC1101 FM Transmitter (CC1101 wiring with the Raspberry Pi) which communicates over spi with the Rock64. How can I activate spidev on the Rock64? I tried to add spidev to the armbianEnv.txt: verbosity=1 console=both ethaddr=02:38:a0:82:2d:c0 eth1addr=02:38:a0:82:2e:c1 overlay_prefix=sun8i-h3 rootdev=UUID=52ddb7ff-487f-4f7c-8606-4e27c00ab708 rootfstype=ext4 overlays=spi-spidev user_overlays=spi-spidev param_spidev_spi_bus=0 param_spidev_max_freq=100000000 usbstoragequirks=0x2537:0x1066:u,0x2537:0x1068:u But spidev is not appearing in /dev/ . I only used Raspberry PI's before, that's why I'm new to use Linux Overlays and stuff like that. I hope anyone can help me.

I am hoping that the community can enlighten me on how the Armbian development process works. I just purchased a Rock 64 board to use for a NextCloud box at home. I am seeing that Armbian seems to be the "best" OS solution for this. I also see that the Armbian release for Rock64 is still in "testing" phase. I would really prefer to run a "stable" release for this application. So my question is how does Armbian for Rock64 move from testing to stable. What is the process, what still needs to be done? I am not a developer or linux expert by any means. I am wondering how the process works so the I can see if I might be able to assist in any way. Thanks!

Hi, do you plan to add Desktop images for Rock64 ? Anyway thanks for your great job. Armbian is wonderful!

My question to the developer: Is there any probability that the native ethernet (gigabit) connection will be working in the future? I think that's the main advantage of the rock64 board (gigabit ethernet AND usb 3.0). Otherwise many other boards will work as well as NAS as the rock64. Thanks in advance for answers!

Thank's for supporting Rock64! Is there a chance for a debian server image (beta) within the near future? All my boards are running a armbian debian OS and I would like to stay consistent here... Best regards Martin

Hey guys. I'm totally new to this, used to fiddle with the PI when it came out but not any real serious projects. Just recently I've gotten annoyed on how I play back media and where I have my storage solution so I figured it was time for an upgrade. I've been reading this thread a lot, much respect goes to tkaiser for making such an amount of info available to us newbies. I actually ordered the Banana PI M3 until I read the wikis and this post which lead me to believe that the BPI M3 would make for a fantastically shitty NAS. I had actually ordered it but canceled the order before it was shipped. From those numbers I interpret that the Clearfog over SATA would be one of the ultimate for a somewhat cheap and good NAS solution, it might how ever be a bit better with a little bit more horse power if I want to use it as more than a NAS. This lead me to check out the ROCK64, which I ultimately bought. I figured that I would use it as a NAS backed by a USB3 Raid5 enclosure and use it for misc other stuff (FTP, backup, etc), but mainly as a NAS and Plex server. So my question is, can I expect to saturate 1-2 users over my gigabit network with that setup and will it work well for my use case? From the numbers that I saw (the more detailed ones here) on the Clearfog I'm expecting to get around 120mb/s write and ~250mb/s read on my setup, would that be in the ballpark of what I can expect? Anything else I need to keep in mind? The ROCK64 will not be running a DE. Sorry if my questions are ignorant somehow. Best regards Stefan

Just got a rock64 board and tried the armbian testing image. Is ethernet working out-of-the-box with this image? My ethernet isn't working. Also the normal password didn't work (root / 1234). Would be nice to have some infos about that.

[Disclaimer on] This is the try to play through some sort of an approval process contuining discussion from here and there -- maybe move @hmartin's last post to the latter thread? IMO we need a transparent process to decide whether to support new devices or not weighing pros/cons for both developers and users and estimate efforts especially if it's a new platform. Even if hardware vendors send out free dev samples we should not automatically start with new boards but discuss and evaluate first since we already deal with way too much boards with a crew just too small. I would believe @Igorhas now every new Olimex device and TL Lim said he sent out 3 ROCK64 boards to various Armbian devs me being amongst... I think that's an opportunity to start to establish such a process now? Since I've thought about this issue for a few days and came to no conclusion (Github issue or not or discussion in forum and so on) I'm now just naively start with a new thread regarding this RK3328 device and maybe we find out collectively how to define a process based on this? [Disclaimer off] Let me introduce ROCK64: RK3328 SoC: feature list ROCK64 schematic (preliminary since vendor promised to accept last minute changes/suggestions within the 2 next weeks) Board layout picture (same form factor as Raspberries, pre-production samples do not fit exactly in RPi enclosures, final design should fit) 1GB, 2GB or 4GB PC-18666 LPDDR3 eMMC has higher boot priority than SD card (but eMMC can be disabled via jumper) socketed eMMC modules are the same as on Pinebook and SoPine (and compatible to older ODROIDs and their SD card adapter) 128Mb SPI NOR flash (16MB) on future board revisions (to directly boot from USB[3] storage, network or whatever) RK3328 should be interesting for media center purposes (4K support, video codedcs, somewhat decent GPU, high memory bandwidth) Due to USB3, GbE and additional Fast Ethernet also interesting for NAS/server use cases (TBC, both USB3 and GbE performance needs to be checked) I2S exposed and compatible to some early RPi DACs, a lot more GPIOs exposed as usual (see picture above and this) Pricing will be competitive (can't share details yet but it's based on amount of DRAM and tries to match Pine64 costs but since DRAM prices increased a lot the last months it might be slightly more. Prices will be announced publicly within the next 2 weeks) Pros: board vendor actively participates (listens to community, provides information including schematic and cares about correctness, tries to bridge developer community and chip vendor) board vendor provides dev samples and documents problems devs might run into (see below) chip vendor actively supports mainline Linux and u-boot chip vendor is said to focus on ROCK64 as currently best supported RK3328 device to spread market adoption (TBC) SDK/BSP not horribly outdated (RK relies currently on 4.4) almost all Armbian target audiences might benefit from RK3328 support (desktop replacement, NAS/server, audiophiles + IoT use cases due to exposed GPIOs/interfaces) No unreliable shitty Micro USB for DC-IN but sane 3.5/1.35mm barrel plug to be combined with 5V/3A PSU Pine Inc already sells together with Pinebook Icenowy already received a dev sample Cons: new platform (Rockchip 64-bit) needing more initial work Did anyone of you received shipping confirmation with tracking number already? @jernej? Unfortunately I get a dev sample with unusable USB3 (some components need to be desoldered which is a pity since I'm not good in soldering at all) My next steps planned: Boot the board with what's provided within one week (TL Lim mentioned a 'Debian based 4.4 BSP, later Yocto' and said RK would be ready with a mainline variant within the next weeks) Test GbE speeds, memory throughput and the usual Armbian tunables (IRQ distribution) ask @Xaliusfor USB3 numbers (his dev sample was shipped out later and doesn't need soldering) Present results to continue discussion