Rock 5 ITX as Multi-purpose App server

[Bobbox]

Hello,

I'm quite new to SBC and linux. On one hand I'm learning a lot, but on the other hand I'm struggling to make it work as I would like.

I already have a low performance Zimaboard (just 2GB Ram) that I use as a NAS and I want the ROCK 5 ITX  8GB to be used as a general purpose apps server for home automation, streaming music, listening music, etc.

One of my use case I'm playing with is the following:

1) music files are on the NAS

2) Music files are played from the Rock5 ITx via the speakers plugged into the headphone jack,

3) The music player is controlled remotely using Lyrion Music Server + Squeezelite.

 

I've already tested the above using the official rock-5-itx_bookworm_kde_b3.output.img.xz image and it works: no rocket science . 

Unfortunately the vendor official image is not very stable: the docker containers crash randomly and even if the SATA drives are detected and mounted at boot time, the got disconnected randomly after some hours.

 

That's why I decided to go experimental and now I'm playing with the following setup and 6 containers running:

 OS: Armbian-unofficial 25.05.0-trunk bookworm aarch64
       ?******************;            Host: Radxa ROCK 5 ITX
      '*n` .'`^,;;,^`'. ,cc.           Kernel: Linux 6.15.0-rc1-edge-rockchip64
     !^         ^^         ":          Shell: bash 5.2.15
    Itttt?'   ~~]rr]   `{tttt,         Terminal: /dev/pts/0
    \tttttt!""I_]r("""~tttttt1         CPU: rk3588 (8) @ 2.40 GHz
  '_tttttttttttt)ftttttttttttti.       GPU: Rockchip rk3588-mali [Integrated]
 \*ztttttttttttttttttttttttttf**[      Memory: 1.80 GiB / 7.75 GiB (23%)
l**c)tttttttttttttttttttttttt(z**,     Swap: 0 B / 3.87 GiB (0%)
.z*x.`tttttttttttttttttttttttt.`u*n    Disk (/): 11.90 GiB / 232.35 GiB (5%) - ext4
>`   (tttttttttttttttttttttt]   "I     Disk (/media/bidone): 44.76 GiB / 3.58 TiB (1%) - ext4
     ,tttttttttttttttttttttt`          Disk (/var/log): 5.31 MiB / 46.84 MiB (11%) - ext4
     ./tttttfttttttttfttttt(           Local IP (wlP2p33s0): 192.168.X.X
      'I)))(\()(tt))|\()({;'           Locale: it_IT.UTF-8

 

Coming back to the play-music-locally use-case, I've a problem with the sound card because I cannot hear the audio.

 

Here the output from Armbianmonitor:

https://paste.armbian.com/apaxoburiz

 

I've both ALSA and PulseAudio. Alsamixer works:

 

Hereunder other outputs, but I'm not expert enough to understand what's going on and why audio is not played by the speakers plugged to the board. No sound with "speaker-test" and "/etc/modprobe.d/sound.conf" doesn't exsist.

HDMI audio is not detected, but I can live without for the moment.

 

 cat /proc/asound/cards
 0 [rk3588es8316   ]: rk3588-es8316 - rk3588-es8316
                      rk3588-es8316

 

sudo dmesg | grep 'snd\|audio\|firmware'
[    0.000000] psci: PSCIv1.1 detected in firmware.
[    0.150543] /i2c@fec90000/audio-codec@11: Fixed dependency cycle(s) with /i2s@fe470000
[    1.495212] /i2s@fe470000: Fixed dependency cycle(s) with /i2c@fec90000/audio-codec@11
[    1.495240] /i2c@fec90000/audio-codec@11: Fixed dependency cycle(s) with /i2s@fe470000
[   15.623287] rtw89_8852be 0002:21:00.0: loaded firmware rtw89/rtw8852b_fw-1.bin

 

 inxi -A
Audio:
  Device-1: audio-graph-card driver: asoc_audio_graph_card
  Device-2: rk3588-dw-hdmi-qp driver: dwhdmiqp_rockchip
  API: ALSA v: k6.15.0-rc1-edge-rockchip64 status: kernel-api
  Server-1: PulseAudio v: 16.1 status: active

 

 aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: rk3588es8316 [rk3588-es8316], device 0: fe470000.i2s-ES8316 HiFi ES8316 HiFi-0 [fe470000.i2s-ES8316 HiFi ES8316 HiFi-0]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

 

alsactl init
alsa-lib parser.c:2783:(load_toplevel_config) Unable to find the top-level configuration file '/usr/share/alsa/ucm2/ucm.conf'.
alsa-lib main.c:1541:(snd_use_case_mgr_open) error: failed to import hw:0 use case configuration -2
Found hardware: "rk3588-es8316" "" "" "" ""
Hardware is initialized using a generic method

 

Thank you: advices are appreciated.

 

Edited 23 hours ago by Bobbox

[Bobbox]

[Solved]

Moved to  kernel 6.1.99-vendor-rk35xx

Everything is detected correctly.

 

[Werner]

7 hours ago, Bobbox said:

Moved to  kernel 6.1.99-vendor-rk35xx

As expected. Mainline Linux support for rk35xx soc family is still under heavy development. There is a good overview what should work and what does not:https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-3588/notes-for-rockchip-3588/-/blob/main/mainline-status.md

[Bobbox]

Thank you Werner.

I'm not into Armbian enough to understand how the hardware is supported across all the kernel versions.

The best I can do is to test different versions until I find the mininum support for the things I want to do.

Till now, kernel 6.1.99-vendor-rk35xx works more or less,  but SATA HDDs are not always detected at boot. OS is installed on a NMVE pcie drive, while the main storage is given by 2 4TB drives in RAID1. 

HDMI output doesn't work for me when kernel 6.12 is used (I have rock 5 ITX - Board version 1.12). 

Kernel 15-rc solves the SATA support, but audio doesn't work.

I went throught many webpages to check if I can solve some issues here and there, but my limited knowledge doesn't allow me to really understand what's going on  and the interactions between elements of the system.

I have to rely on the hard work of the developers community, waiting for better support in the future, if any.

Edited 2 hours ago by Bobbox