NixOS on ARM/PINE64 ROCK64

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PINE64 ROCK64
Manufacturer	PINE64 (Pine Microsystems Inc.)
Architecture	AArch64
Bootloader	Downstream (ayufan) U-Boot
Boot options	SD, eMMC, SPI NOR Flash

The ROCK64 is a single board computer built around the Rockchip RK3328 SoC.

There are three models of the board, with 1, 2 or 4 GB of RAM. It can boot from an microSD card or an eMMC. It also has a 128 Mbit SPI flash that can be used to store the bootloader.

Status

It is possible to run NixOS on this board using a downstream U-Boot and kernel. This can be done with manual partitioning and nixos-install or possibly by building an SD image with the correct kernel and bootloader, but the latter has not been tested.

The upstream aarch64 SD image may boot if U-Boot is placed at the correct location as described below, but this has not been tested. There may be issues with ethernet and USB with the mainline kernel.

U-Boot for this board is packaged in nixpkgs, and Hydra builds can be found here: https://hydra.nixos.org/job/nixpkgs/trunk/ubootRock64.aarch64-linux This bootloader is not entirely open, incorporating a blob for the tertiary program loader (TPL).

Board-specific installation notes

U-Boot needs to be copied to sector 64 on the microSD card or eMMC with dd. Download/build U-Boot for the board, and copy idbloader.img to the correct location with (replace /dev/mmcblkX with the correct path to the SD card device):

sudo dd if=idbloader.img of=/dev/mmcblkX bs=512 seek=64

On many kernels, the ethernet driver cannot handle hardware check-summing of large packets, therefore this feature must be disabled for the ethernet to be stable. This can be done with the following NixOS configuration:

networking.localCommands = ''
  ${pkgs.ethtool}/bin/ethtool -K eth0 rx off tx off
'';

Serial console

The ROCK64 uses a GPIO pinout compatible with the Raspberry Pi 2 and newer. This means that the following pins can be used to connect a serial adapter:

Pi-2 Bus
Pin	Function
6	GND
8	UART0_TX
10	UART0_RX

The serial console runs at 1500000 baud in the bootloader.

Compatibility notes

This article or section needs expansion.

Reason: Need to verify hardware support on different kernels, this was written from memory (Discuss in Talk:NixOS on ARM/PINE64 ROCK64#)
Please consult the pedia article metapage for guidelines on contributing.

Mainline kernel
Ethernet	Works on 4.20, if hardware check-summing is disabled (see above)
USB	As of 4.20, USB 3.0 does not work
ayufan-rock64/linux-mainline-kernel
Ethernet	Works if hardware check-summing is disabled (see above)
USB	USB hot plugging does not work

Downstream kernel

To use all hardware functionality, it is currently necessary to use a downstream kernel:

• ayufan-rock64/linux-kernel 4.4 based on Rockchip BSP
• ayufan-rock64/linux-mainline-kernel mainline based, with potentially fewer hardware features supported. This kernel is not based on a kernel stable branch, so it may have more bugs (unrelated to the hardware).

Note: Keep in mind that using non-upstream forks of the kernel always incurs some security risk.

Resources

• Official product page