Efforts to develop firmware for H96 MAX M9 RK3576 TV Box 8G/128G

[Hqnicolas]

On 4/11/2025 at 10:38 AM, Keko said:

(ideally something around 10fps, for 1920x1080 frames) on the H96 max M9s.

 

that's really a good performance, congratulations

for comparison i do 3fps 320x240 on rk3566

Edited April 12 by Hqnicolas

[cmuki]

Seems like I got some progress/regress with the board - I added some extra arguments in the armbianEnv.txt file - verbosity=7 and extraargs debug to try and see what the reason for the freeze might be and these three jobs were stuck, resulting in a kernel panic (end Kernel panic - not syncing: panic_On_set_idle_set) - systemd-udev-trigger.service/start, dev-ttyFIQ0.device/start and systemd-tmpfiles-setup-dev.service/start. Tried disabling the FIQ0 node in the dts (at least I think so), but the UART just stopped and it hanged again (the Armsom Sige 5 also has this in its dt). Managed to get a few times in initramfs, but it wans't helping me in the slightest. When adding init=/bin/bash, I could also avoid the hang, but it wasn't that productive.

[cmuki]

Good news and bad news - I found the culprit for the kernel panic, but it's the GPU - once I blacklisted the panfrost module, it booted and completed the initial setup. The rknpu driver is v0.9.8, so it should be usable with the immich ML. Probably will try to investigate the GPU issue, but not anytime soon.

[xiaobao80]

 GPU  blacklisted the panfrost module   Has it been resolved？ Thank you

[cmuki]

Hey, @xiaobao80! Sadly not - but on the upside I was able to build and use the latest kernel.

 

Also want to update and say that I did manage to use the NPU and the VPU successfully with Immich AI facial recognition and Jellyfin transcoding respectively.

[darcyg]

@xiaobao80, The official use is the closed source Mali library. Panfrost is an open-source GPU library.
It should be that the Panfrost module does not yet support rk3576

[darcyg]

hey, @cmuki!  
 

Using the dts from the rk3576-evb1-v10 / rk3576-armsom-sige5 / rk3576-rock-4d in the https://github.com/radxa/kernel/arch/arm64/boot/dts/rockchip/ directory

After modification, they can all boot the Armbian version h96-m9s

Note: The rk3576-linux.dtsi file forcibly specifies the UUID of the rootfs device partition, which may cause system boot failure.

Adjustments might be needed.

The basic modification method is simple: disable the PCIe and GMAC1 configurations, modify the reset_pin configuration of GMAC0 to

gpio2 and PB3 to enter the system. I used rock-4d as the template for modification.

Other modifications have not been thoroughly studied yet.

[Hqnicolas]

7 hours ago, darcyg said:

I used rock-4d as the template for modification.

thanks @darcyg 
if you can, share it with us