aprayoga Posted May 11, 2020 Share Posted May 11, 2020 Hi all, currently i'm working on upcoming Helios64 board. For RK3399 board there are 2 families, what are the differences between them? I've been following discussion on github and this forum for few months but still unsure which family i should use. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tido Posted May 11, 2020 Share Posted May 11, 2020 3 minutes ago, aprayoga said: For RK3399 board there are 2 families, Could you name the two families? And maybe say one or two words about your expectation about each. So, people know where you come from and what you are looking for. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aprayoga Posted May 11, 2020 Author Share Posted May 11, 2020 2 minutes ago, Tido said: Could you name the two families? And maybe say one or two words about your expectation about each. So, people know where you come from and what you are looking for. the families are - rk3399 only rockpro64 and rock pi 4 under this family - rockchip64 the rest of rk3399 boards. Helios64 can boot with both family with the correct device tree (different dts for rk3399 and rockchip64). looking at this PR https://github.com/armbian/build/pull/1934 it seems the direction is to merge rk3399 to rockchip64 (implied by renaming the the patch folder from rk3399 into rockchip64 instead of the other way a round). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
piter75 Posted May 11, 2020 Share Posted May 11, 2020 6 minutes ago, aprayoga said: the direction is to merge rk3399 to rockchip64 TL;DR This is indeed the direction and one day rk3399 will most probably vanish. As for the split between the two families - it happened some time ago because of issues with LPDDR4 boards. Rock Pi 4 and RockPro64 were left in rockchip64 with old u-boot and the DDR3 based pack of rk3399 boards were extracted to separate family with mainline u-boot. Currently the main difference between those families is legacy kernel source: rockchip64 (https://github.com/ayufan-rock64/linux-kernel) rk3399 (https://github.com/friendlyarm/kernel-rockchip) At some point we will unify the legacy kernels to some stable point of: https://github.com/rockchip-linux/kernel The other difference is that rk3399 uses exclusively mainline u-boot (v2020.04) vs. rockchip64 where most boards use u-boot v2017.04 (https://github.com/ayufan-rock64/linux-u-boot). After the PR you mentioned boards in rockchip64 can also use the mainline u-boot (eg. Rock Pi 4 and NanoPi R2S). It is messy now but we are in the process of cleaning it up ;-) What kernel are you planning to use? Legacy / current? What u-boot are you planning to use? Legacy / mainline? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tido Posted May 11, 2020 Share Posted May 11, 2020 4 hours ago, aprayoga said: the direction is to merge rk3399 to rockchip64 (implied by renaming the the patch folder from rk3399 into rockchip64 instead of the other way a round). 3 hours ago, piter75 said: This is indeed the direction and one day rk3399 will most probably vanish. Please correct me aprayoga, but I think you mean the single common thing of all of them is RK3399. Why changing/renaming it to rockchip64, which is very specific a SingleBoardComputer and not a SoC descriptor? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
balbes150 Posted May 11, 2020 Share Posted May 11, 2020 1 hour ago, Tido said: Please correct me aprayoga, but I think you mean the single common thing of all of them is RK3399. Why changing/renaming it to rockchip64, which is very specific a SingleBoardComputer and not a SoC descriptor? Agree. The name rockchip64 - for rk3399 is unfortunate and creates confusion. It is better to use rk3399. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
piter75 Posted May 11, 2020 Share Posted May 11, 2020 4 hours ago, Tido said: Why changing/renaming it to rockchip64, which is very specific a SingleBoardComputer and not a SoC descriptor? You probably meant RockPro64 which is indeed a SBC name that is now part of rockchip64 family. 2 hours ago, balbes150 said: Agree. The name rockchip64 - for rk3399 is unfortunate and creates confusion Well... IMHO the name is fitting well. The idea of rockchip64 family is to consolidate one day all (rockchip 64) bit boards if possible - that means all based on 64 bit SoCs, eg. rk3328, rk3399 and rk3308. The rockchip64 family is nothing new - it already exists and contains rk3328 and rk3399 boards. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tido Posted May 12, 2020 Share Posted May 12, 2020 11 hours ago, piter75 said: that is now part of rockchip64 family Well, spotted, my bad However, trying to merge/consolidate all in one - almost screams for rules-of-exception (aka messy), "Perfection leads to chaos". So, if it doesn't work to consolidate ALL 64-Bit RockChip under one-hood, people with a 64-Bit Rockchip that is not under that hood, will be disappointed, things doesn't work. Whereas if you keep the rk3399 it is crystal clear. Just saying Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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