ROCK Pi S does not boot

[gudvinr]

None of the images from https://www.armbian.com/rockpi-s/ work (neither minimal nor cli).

I tried writing minimal image onto SD NAND and tried booting both cli and minimal from SD card.

 

I tried 2 different SD cards too.

 

Board was connected through UART0 to PC and while I get output when I use rkdeveloptool, there is no output when trying to boot normally.

 

However, latest image from https://github.com/radxa/rock-pi-s-images-released/releases works (rockpis_debian_buster_server_arm64_20210924_0412-gpt.img) does boot if I write it to SD NAND or SD card.

 

I have V1.3 with RK3308 and 1GB SD NAND.

[Werner]

Try older from archive

[Igor]

We only deal with R&D of mainline based kernel here. Copy pasting their kernel doesn't add much value.

 

9 hours ago, gudvinr said:

However, latest image from https://github.com/radxa/rock-pi-s-images-released/releases works

We dropped, legacy Rockchip made and maintained kernel 4.4.y / 5.10 perhaps now, some time ago. With mainline, things are much more complicated and expensive. It is very hard to lead R&D with almost complete (99.5%) absence of people that needs this software support and where ROI is extremely negative. What is provided is provided with very limited resources and we are very close to abandoning this very little what we have.

 

There are more (unknown number) different board revisions out there which just adds costs, waste more of our most precious resource - time. They have incompatible boot firmware that needs to be adjusted. Our device in automatic testing facility show instability ... It boots, but doesn't survive many reboots. There are 100+ similar HW cases around with their own pros and cons and only X hours per day we can work on something. 

[gudvinr]

14 minutes ago, Igor said:

We dropped, legacy Rockchip made and maintained kernel 4.4.y / 5.10 perhaps now, some time ago.

I am not complaining about that, I just tried different images and reporting what works and what isn't.

 

I'd gladly use mainline image but I wouldn't make this post if it did work. But it doesn't and I have no feedback from the board because it's just dead silent about it.

 

17 minutes ago, Igor said:

They have incompatible boot firmware that needs to be adjusted.

https://dl.radxa.com/rockpis/images/loader/

 

You mean this one?

From what I learnt, rk3308_loader_ddr589MHz_uart0_m0_v2.06.136sd.bin works for rk3308bs chip variant and rk3308_loader_uart0_m0_emmc_port_support_sd_20190717.bin is for older revisions

 

3 hours ago, Werner said:

Try older from archive

I tried flashing these images (last image that I had on the device SD NAND before that was rockpis_debian_buster_server_arm64_20210924_0412-gpt.img):

• Armbian_21.05.9_Rockpi-s_buster_legacy_4.4.247_minimal.img works from SD NAND (haven't tried booting from SD card)
• Armbian_21.05.9_Rockpi-s_buster_current_5.10.43_minimal.img doesn't work with SD NAND but boots up from SD card (it is likely using UART2 but blue LED blinks).
• Armbian_22.08.1_Rockpi-s_bullseye_current_5.15.63.img also booting up from SD card successfully
• Armbian_22.11.2_Rockpi-s_bullseye_edge_6.0.10_minimal.img booting up from SD card successfully
• Armbian_23.02.1_Rockpi-s_bullseye_edge_6.1.14_minimal.img booting up from SD card successfully
• Armbian_23.5.1_Rockpi-s_bookworm_current_6.1.30_minimal.img booting up from SD card successfully

• Armbian_23.5.2_Rockpi-s_bookworm_current_6.1.32_minimal.img surprisingly works too

But after I wrote Armbian_23.5.1_Rockpi-s_bookworm_current_6.1.30_minimal.img to SD NAND it didn't boot at all but AND it stopped booting from SD card as well.

 

Then, I flashed rockpis_debian_buster_server_arm64_20210924_0412-gpt.img to SD NAND again, it booted successfully.

After that, I put SD card back in and Armbian that was there boot up.

 

So, there's definitely something shady going on.

 

 

[gudvinr]

Another thing I noticed is that og image has 2 GPT partitions:

 

Disk rockpis_debian_buster_server_arm64_20210924_0412-gpt.img: 905.99 MiB, 950000128 bytes, 1855469 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 3B415353-E727-4A03-8826-2ABFEF6808AC

Device                                                     Start     End Sectors  Size Type
rockpis_debian_buster_server_arm64_20210924_0412-gpt.img1  32768  262143  229376  112M EFI System
rockpis_debian_buster_server_arm64_20210924_0412-gpt.img2 262144 1855435 1593292  778M Linux filesystem

And rkdeveloptool lists those partitions as well:

$ rkdeveloptool ppt
**********Partition Info(GPT)**********
NO  LBA       Name                
00  00008000  boot
01  00040000  rootfs

While Armbian image doesn't:

Disk Armbian_21.05.9_Rockpi-s_buster_legacy_4.4.247_minimal.img: 912 MiB, 956301312 bytes, 1867776 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x68f75ccf

Device                                                      Boot Start     End Sectors  Size Id Type
Armbian_21.05.9_Rockpi-s_buster_legacy_4.4.247_minimal.img1      32768 1867775 1835008  896M 83 Linux

Disk Armbian_23.5.2_Rockpi-s_bookworm_current_6.1.32_minimal.img: 1.13 GiB, 1207959552 bytes, 2359296 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x6812e470

Device                                                       Boot Start     End Sectors  Size Id Type
Armbian_23.5.2_Rockpi-s_bookworm_current_6.1.32_minimal.img1      32768 2359295 2326528  1.1G 83 Linux

 

But if I write Armbian_21.05.9_Rockpi-s_buster_legacy_4.4.247_minimal.img which doesn't have GPT, I still can boot from SD NAND, although rkdeveloptool shows no partitions:

$ rkdeveloptool ppt
Not found any partition table!

 

I didn't expect 23.5.2 to boot from NAND because it's bigger than NAND size (2359296 > 2027520) but I don't understand why it doesn't boot from SD card unless there's bootable image on the NAND.

 

Arguably, minimal image still should be able to fit to 1G NAND because it has 82M of free space. Also Python is still there (FAQ says it shouldn't) as well as bunch of locales (only needed locales can be generated manually instead) and doc packages. But that's not exactly relevant for the topic.

Edited August 30, 2023 by gudvinr

[Igor]

2 hours ago, gudvinr said:

You mean this one?

I don't know. Just speculating - it has to do something around boot area / low level init as Armbian works normally on 1st class / right hardware.

 

Armbian comes in single partition in most of the cases. That is nothing unusual and not a problem.

[gudvinr]

49 minutes ago, gudvinr said:

Arguably, minimal image still should be able to fit to 1G NAND because it has 82M of free space. Also Python is still there (FAQ says it shouldn't) as well as bunch of locales (only needed locales can be generated manually instead) and doc packages.

In continuation of this, I also tried to make smaller image by formatting .img file exactly like Armbian_21.05.9_Rockpi-s_buster_legacy_4.4.247_minimal.img and copied content from Armbian_23.5.2_Rockpi-s_bookworm_current_6.1.32_minimal.img using `sudo rsync -avh mount_point_og mount_point_custom --exclude 'usr/share/locale' --exclude 'usr/share/doc'`.

I don't have 8G NAND version so I can't really test it as is but it should be good enough™ I guess.

 

It also didn't boot (silently) but after I flashed Armbian_21.05.9_Rockpi-s_buster_legacy_4.4.247_minimal.img back, it booted successfully. So, I think there's 2 things:

• After I flashed oversized image something (what?) got overwritten and device couldn't boot anymore even from sd card (but it's not clear why)
• Newer images don't seem to boot at all from NAND even if partition is okay

[Igor]

2 hours ago, gudvinr said:

Newer images don't seem to boot at all from NAND even if partition is okay

AFAIK modern kernel doesn't have support for NAND (at least not all variants that exists) and you need to add it.

[gudvinr]

7 minutes ago, Igor said:

AFAIK modern kernel doesn't have support for NAND (at least not all variants that exists) and you need to add it.

I don't think it matters in case of rockpi-s because it isn't raw NAND and they have sd controller:

https://wiki.radxa.com/RockpiS/hardware/SDNAND