Supporting Radxa Rock (RK3188)

[bayindirh]

Hello all,

 

I just wanted to ask is there any consideration to support Radxa Rock (Standard/Pro) in any form. It is/was a Rk3188 based board with 2GB RAM and 8GB of flash. I'm using it as a VPN server with Debian 8 and it proved very reliable in all departments over the years. It was quite powerful for its time and I think it could prove to be very useful since it can be left to run without any active cooling or anything. I'm putting it here for consideration since I guess supporting RK3188 won't create any substantial workload, and it can do a lot even for today's standards.

 

I have two of the devices and can use one of them for testing if required. Was unable to post anything to board bring-up subforum since I had no right to post there.

 

More information about the board can be found here. Please feel free to correct me about the work required or just toss the idea away. No hard feelings, but I'd be happy if I can use these boards with something modern and be part of the effort if it's feasible.

[tparys]

May be worth reading this thread for some background. May be more work than you might think ... https://forum.armbian.com/topic/17492-newbie-cpu-marvell-armada-370/

 

My understanding is that the Rockchip CPUs have device unique boot blobs as part of the boot sequence. I believe this would be the only RK3188, so would be a one-off, and may require substantial u-boot or kernel DTB work with the payoff being a somewhat older and under powered board (compared to more recent RK3399).

 

You can certainly leverage the Armbian build system to generate a build for your board, but you might be stuck with testing/debug unless you can find someone with free time. You can take a look HERE to see what's required to add support for a new CPU family & board.

[bayindirh]

Thanks tparys for answer and the links. Rock's documentation was good enough to start and explore. I'll play with both Armbian and Rock's kernel building process and see what can I do. Will report my progress here.

 

Regards,

 

H.

[balbes150]

 

[cracker]

12 hours ago, balbes150 said:

Radxa rock pro lan8720a not work.Can you help me? Thanks!

 

[tparys]

@cracker, I don't think those images that @balbes150 linked to were ready to go for the Radxa Rock, but were probably intended for RK3188 TV boxes.

 

If you tried them and they booted, that's a promising start. However, there's almost certainly substantial board differences (like your LAN), which will need to be reflected in the DTB.

 

[bayindirh]

1 minute ago, tparys said:

@cracker, I don't think those images that @balbes150 linked to were ready to go for the Radxa Rock, but were probably intended for RK3188 TV boxes.

 

If you tried them and they booted, that's a promising start. However, there's almost certainly substantial board differences (like your LAN), which will need to be reflected in the DTB.

 

 

The biggest problem with Radxa Rock was building the kernel. The source and configuration of the latest 3.x kernel is available with all the drivers in Radxa's GitHub repository. If we can somehow port these changes to latest Linux kernel, building the userspace is really simple.

[tparys]

It looks like the Armbian TV images look like they might be using 5.10.27. The hard part of updating the kernel and u-boot may be done.

 

The remaining work is likely identifying any DTB differences between the 3.x legacy kernel and the more modern 5.10. You can always drop in the old DTB and hope for the best, but I know there have been some format changes over the years to make things more standard and consistent.

[bayindirh]

6 minutes ago, tparys said:

It looks like the Armbian TV images look like they might be using 5.10.27. The hard part of updating the kernel and u-boot may be done.

 

The remaining work is likely identifying any DTB differences between the 3.x legacy kernel and the more modern 5.10. You can always drop in the old DTB and hope for the best, but I know there have been some format changes over the years to make things more standard and consistent.

I was planning to try compiling the new kernel with old DTB but had no time lately. I can build the userspace in a pretty straightforward way. If I can create a development environment (even for vanilla Debian), will package it as a Vagrant file and share there, so it'll be reproducible.

 

Maybe I can take some hints from the latest TV box releases. Did some (mid-weight) distro development work in my professional life, but never had to play with the kernel. This might be a good opportunity to do so.

 

I know 3188 is old stuff, but if you can make old stuff run fast, new stuff runs even faster. So, I stubbornly try to use my stuff to its limits.

[cracker]

On 5/8/2021 at 2:49 AM, tparys said:

 

https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v5.10.35/source/arch/arm/boot/dts/rk3188-radxarock.dts   

The mainline kernel has complete raxda rock support, including lan8720a. And dmesg display has been driven.