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[Solved] Supporting Rockchip Processors


nightseas

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Hi,

 

Is there any plan fro Armbian to support Rockchip processors like RK3288 or RK3399? Any guide on how to port Armbian on them?

 

These processors have official support on GPU (both openCL and openGL ES), HW video codec (like H264 encoding and decoding with gstream), and also open-sourced Kernel 4.4.x. And most important thing is they are willing to support opensource community and fix their bugs continuously.

 

I've got a RK3288 proto board which was able to run Linux 4.4 + Debian with HW accelerated desktop and video playing, and it worked perfect. The only thing that troubled me is the Debian system that maintained by Rockchip is suck...

 

So I'm looking on the great Armbian now. I'll star to port it when I have time. But I'm here to ask if it's considerable to have Rockchip supported officially.

 

IMG_20170109_150553_HDR.jpg

 

 

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Somehow Rockckip boards didn't find way to us and at least I don't know much people dealing with those boards. The idea exits, but no real action has ever been taken. I only own one Rockchip powered board from Olimex with older 3188. Unfortunately this boards sits in the drawer most of the time  :(

 

Adding official support for new platform is a bit hard at the moment, since core crew is small - overloaded and we hardly manage to support current list of devices. On top of this, there are already some devices in the queue.

 

Very basic outline: Armbian is an build script, which pools sources from different locations and compile them into boot-able image. We take care of configuration, additional patches and various modifications to the Debian / Ubuntu base.

 

If you want to bring new platform to this system, you need to know how to build it manually and get known with the build system. It's not that complicated and some documentation exists. Then those manually working recipes / snippets are moved to certain parts of the script. New board can become a part of the script if someone take care of all this, but it can only remain in a WIP section, since support means more than adding a board here.

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I bough RK3299 at one point for hacking. Unfortunatelly, I can't find any SDK. Does anyone now where to find it?

 

On the other hand, I'm more and more interested in RK3288 based boards. Support for that chip should be pretty good in mainline kernel. If someone know cheap board (max. 50 USD), please tell me. I think I could find some time to add support for it.

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On the other hand, I'm more and more interested in RK3288 based boards. Support for that chip should be pretty good in mainline kernel. If someone know cheap board (max. 50 USD), please tell me. I think I could find some time to add support for it.

 

You can get some cheap RK3188 TV-boxes on eBay (for instance the CS918 which has 2GB RAM)

I've got one of these (so I'd of course vote for an Armbian for RK3188).

 

As I don't have any 64-bit Intel or AMD box, I cannot build Armbian. If I could, I would certainly try, and I would probably also be able to write the resulting Linux to the NAND flash. ;)

 

If you need a RK3288 box, you can find some $58 boxes on eBay; there might be cheaper RK3288 TV-boxes elsewhere too.

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As I don't have any 64-bit Intel or AMD box, I cannot build Armbian. If I could, I would certainly try, and I would probably also be able to write the resulting Linux to the NAND flash. ;)

You can use anything that can run VirtualBox, including x86 systems and some Macs. Though there is no Rockchip support in Armbian and if you want only rootfs you can extract it from any of available images.

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You can use anything that can run VirtualBox, including x86 systems and some Macs. Though there is no Rockchip support in Armbian and if you want only rootfs you can extract it from any of available images.

 

My Macs are PowerPC based. My other option is CubieBoard, so it's probably still a no-go.

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You can use anything that can run VirtualBox, including x86 systems and some Macs. Though there is no Rockchip support in Armbian and if you want only rootfs you can extract it from any of available images.

Nice to know that.

Is there a quick/easy way of extracting just the rootfs from the images?

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Regarding RK3399, I find that the Vorke Z3 has some pretty interesting specs.

 

For a long time I've been interested in getting a cheap S912 box, but the Vorke Z3 might have convinced me otherwise; especially if the S-ATA is handled by the RK3399 directly (not via USB).

As I see it, there are several ways they could implement S-ATA; the most probable is via PCIe2.1.

 

The Vorke Z3 special highlights: 2GHz Dual-core Cortex-A72+Quad-core Cortex-a53, S-ATA, USB3, 4GB LPDDR3 RAM, 32GB eMMC, and they've been kind enough to let us know that their WiFi module is AP6356S.

 

As the company sells other boxes (less interesting to me), which have ubuntu pre-installed, they might be able to provide some developer info.

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Well, we plan to officially support S912, we got two boxes, while RK hasn't come to the wish list yet. 

Vorke V3 looks beast "on paper", true. Just don't rely solo on technical specs and sellers data since without solid software support this is just a paperweight.

 

And the device is not even in stores yet.

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Vorke V3 looks beast "on paper", true. Just don't rely solo on technical specs and sellers data since without solid software support this is just a paperweight.

That is so true; I've burnt my fingers on the Lamobo-R1; I can't even get it to spit out any debug info over the UART.

I still don't have any money free for buying a board or TV-box, but maybe in a few months. Currently my best bets are the Vorke-Z3 and the X92 (X92, because it has most of the features I want). I'll keep an eye on cnx-software and see if a test of the Vorke-Z3 shows up. If it's worth buying, I'll probably go for that box.

Note: The reason I bought the Lamobo-R1 was that ipfire.org listed it as "IPFire works excellent on this board". I do trust Thomas more; I wish I had known him back then... ;)

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There's the ASUS Tinker Board that use the Rockchip 3288 SoC.

However, a quick Google search seems to tell me it's a bit mythical. Nevertheless, I'm able to pre-order it here in Denmark for ~€63, with a 1-2 month shipping time, of course, as it is magically out of stock.

 

Specs: http://www.cnx-software.com/2017/01/05/asus-tinker-board-is-a-raspberry-pi-3-alternative-based-on-rockchip-rk3288-processor/

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it's probably not the right time to order those boards.

asus tinker board is not officially available yet and if price target holds then it's probable the miqi will have to drop price or disappear.. 

 

it's unfortunate that qmaker could not produce the 1G/8G version of the board at 35$ as initially announced.

it's also not great that almost no tv boxes were produced using that soc, i could only find 3 on taobao and the cheapest one is probably a fake.

 

i'm quite surprised by the heavy price of those rk3288 (2014) devices, is it because of the powerful Mali GPU and/or that it made it more difficult to produce that soc ?

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after looking around i found this today : 

 

Chiptrip Q8 rk3288 2G/8G (38e free shipping gearbest sale) 

http://www.gearbest.com/tv-box-mini-pc/pp_346070.html?wid=21

 

Although it's listed as 10/100 LAN, other Q8 specs show that some have Gbe, also verified by looking at the onboard transceiver model.

Of course i can't guarantee that that particular version will have Gbe, i will update when i receive mine.

 

looking at forums i found a thread on 4pda "VSMART Q8 v10", discussing that tv box.

The latest posts also claim that miqi / firefly ubuntu 16.04 firmwares are running on those "Q8" box.

 

although i found more rk3288 tv boxes, most of them are no longer produced/sold and other are priced much higher 80-120e.

 

i must say that if that Q8 box performs anywhere near the miqi level and even more if it has Gbe, i'll be very glad to have one of those.

 

Edited by mdel
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Mark this topic as solved since RK3288 has already been supported by Armbian.

 

I've talked to some cooperators of RK and it seems RK is officially contributing to the project ( not confirmed ), and they are willing to pay more attention to opensoure work.

 

Good good!

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1 minute ago, nightseas said:

 

I've talked to some cooperators of RK and it seems RK is officially contributing to the project ( not confirmed ), and they are willing to pay more attention to opensoure work.

It's up to the Rockchip (SoC vendor) to contribute to the mainline kernel and u-boot development, and they are actively contributing compared to Allwinner (where all work is done by the linux-sunxi community and getting any documentation from Allwinner is not as easy as it should be).

Supporting the Armbian project is another story and it's up to the board makers to provide, for example, sample boards to the developers interested in them.

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