Rock 5 ITX+ with two M.2 instead of M.2/SATA

[Malz]

Hi,

 

this week my Rock 5 ITX+ board arrived and I started installing Armbian with vendor kernel (now on 6.1.99-vendor-rk35xx).

 

This board has slightly different hardware than the original ITX. It has two M.2 M-key (2-lanes) instead of one M.2 M-key and four SATA ports.

I think because of the different hardware configuration the DTB has to be changed as no SATA controller is present on the board.

With the ITX DTB I am experiencing problems with not regonizing NVME disks when activating ASPM in armbianEnv.txt.

 

I have no experience in editing DTBs or applying patches, so I need help to figure out what to do to make things work.

 

armbianmonitor log: https://paste.next.armbian.com/asoxunogeg

 

Thanks

 

Thomas

[prahal]

I "believe" that a board can only ship one DTB armbian wise. I will have to study that to be confident though. If the board is not the same hardware wise, it could be it requires its own "board" config in armbian. It being close won't help (except it will make it easier for this board maintainer as most of the work will already have been done).

I have no experience in adding a new board to armbian, but I believe cloning the armbian/build repository and creating a new config/boards/ is the first step.

And having a new tag for this board on the forum.

 

As a local hack (I believe this is not a proper fix but I might be wrong), you might be able to create an override dtb file to remove existing nodes and add new ones to an existing board dtb.

[Malz]

Hi,

 

thanks for your reply.

 

In the meantime I did some (a lot) more testing and set up a armbian build environment to try things out.

At first I created a patch for the current dtb and applied it to the build. I tried to figure out what to change in the current dtb, but had no luck. As soon as I go for powersave to activate ASPM I loose some of the PCIe devices.

 

I also did some testing with "latest" Radxa Debian 12 image, which doesn't come with a special variant for the newer ITX+ board. This image comes with a 6.1 kernel and there is no problem when going to powersave for ASPM activating.

 

That leads me to the fact that there is no special dtb needed for the ITX+ variant of the board.

 

My guess is that the current dtb from mainline isn't perfect. It works but with activated ASPM some devices (m.2 and ethernet) will have problems. lspci -vv output shows " !!! Unknown header type 7f" for those devices.

 

I did a decompile of the current dtb in use of the (working) radxa image and the current armbian to examine the differences to find some cause, but they are very different and my knowledge in device trees seems far to poor.

 

It would be great to fix the ASPM issues as it reduced the power consumption of the radxa build by ~2W which means  about 25% compared with deactivated ASPM consumption of ~8W.