Rock 3B armbian

[aardvark3]

Hey everyone, was wondering if there was a readily available rock3b armbian image. I have found that the rock3a/3b are quite similar baring an extra ethernet port. So was hoping to see if I could take the rock3a image and make some simple modifications but don't know how. Any help would be appreciated thanks.

[DMC]

What kind of image do You need? desktop or cli? 

As far as I remember I built few images for 3B with both ethernet ports (plus one extra with 2.5G A+E adapter) 

[Dragon]

Hi, I am also looking for an image for the Rock3b... the rock 3a image boots, but none of the ethernet port works (I have temporarily solved it with a usb lan adapter)

I am trying to update the spi flash via the armbian-config right now

 

I tried to search the downloads for an image specifically for the Rock3B, but could not find any....

[Igor]

We have 3a and 3c. What is the difference anyway? Doesn't work with any of those?

[eselarm]

I have copied/merged the latest Radxa rk356x kernel from the official latest Radxa Bullseye CLI image into Armbian Bookworm that runs on my Rock3A and I see there is the file:

/usr/lib/linux-image-5.10.160-39-rk356x/rockchip/rk3568-rock-3b.dtb
 

Same .DTB file is not in Armbian vendor (6.1.99) or mainline/current (6.12.13), which means no Armbian support for Rock3b.

But if you use a current Rock3A image as base and copy that old 5.10 kernel into the image and also put the 'rk3568-rock-3b.dtb' in the armbianEnv.txt, I guess it will boot and recognize all Rock3B hardware.

 

Rock3A images use an extra FAT boot partition, so make sure you understand which files and under which names you need to copy. I mount the bootFAT in a own custom folder /boot/uboot, so I keep multiple kernels in /boot (which is rootfs) and copy a particular one to the bootFAT.

Edited February 13 by eselarm

[Dragon]

Quote

We have 3a and 3c. What is the difference anyway? Doesn't work with any of those?

the Rock 3B has 2x Ethernet ports and unfortunately neither of them work with the Rock 3A image.

[Werner]

Maybe this is why:https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-rockchip/patch/20241220163227.1501912-1-alicja.michalska@9elements.com/

[Dragon]

this patch is not yet implemented if I understand corectly.

Quote

Maybe this is why:https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-rockchip/patch/20241220163227.1501912-1-alicja.michalska@9elements.com/

 

[Kwiboo]

As I stated in a reply in that patch thread, those changes are not fully necessary.

 

Boot your ROCK 3B with mainline U-Boot built for the ROCK 3B and ethernet on mainline Linux should work.

 

Use ROCK 3A or 3C boot firmware and you will have i.e. ethernet phy issue on mainline Linux.

[Werner]

9 hours ago, Dragon said:

this patch is not yet implemented if I understand corectly.

Yes. This patch has been sent upstream and is awaiting either rejection, correction or acceptance. Without reading through it properly I assume this is an attempt to fix the initial issue with the ethernet ports.

 

[eselarm]

While updating/upgrading my NanoPi-R6C, I see there is now:

/usr/lib/linux-image-6.13.2-edge-rockchip64/rockchip/rk3568-rock-3b.dtb

I do not know if the earlier mentioned patch is included, but at least that DTB file is different from the rk3568-rock-3a.dtb one.

So if you add or switch to the beta repo, you can simply install the edge kernel.

 

And as already mentioned in other post, check U-Boot version. If you want generic headless ARM64 computing, use mainline U-Boot and mainline kernel. You can't use a few things like HEVC, H264 (trans)coding, but overall it works fine. I ran even full desktop KDE neon on my Rock3A, it is good Wayland GUI speed.

I got my Rock3A 1st week of december 2024, so that was in transition from legacy U-Boot to mainline U-Boot and also 6.6.x to 6.12+ kernel. 6.12+ (the rk3588 or now rockchip64) has several great features enabled/included by default like was already always default in vanilla Debian AMD64/ARM64 kernels, so easy to get things working like for PC/AMD64.

 

Edited Sunday at 11:50 AM by eselarm

[Kwiboo]

8 hours ago, Werner said:

Without reading through it properly I assume this is an attempt to fix the initial issue with the ethernet ports.

There should only be an issue when someone use boot firmware intended for a different board.

 

Please read the patch thread, the patch was partially rejected.

 

If you want to do a custom patch just replace ethernet-phy-ieee802.3-c22 with ethernet-phy-id001c.c916 in Linux device tree.

[aardvark3]

Hi, sorry for the very late reply.

@DMC, I would really appreciate a 3B cli image. And if you wouldn't mind giving a brief description on how you built it would be amazing.

@eselarm, Are you saying that I should be able to build an armbian image using the beta kernel for the 3B and it could possibly just work?

From reading the rest of the replies it seems as though I should be able to build a mainline uboot and kernel for the 3B and everything should just work, is that correct?

Thanks everyone

[eselarm]

15 minutes ago, aardvark3 said:

@eselarm, Are you saying that I should be able to build an armbian image using the beta kernel for the 3B and it could possibly just work?

Not even building, just adding/installing the edge kernel to a working/running Rock3A image.