NixOS on ARM/PINE64 ROCK64

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PINE64 ROCK64
Manufacturer	PINE64 (Pine Microsystems Inc.)
Architecture	AArch64
Bootloader	Upstream U-Boot
Boot options	microSD, 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

This board has upstream U-Boot and kernel support, although the mainline kernel may still be missing some features. NixOS can be installed using manual partitioning and nixos-install or by modifying the aarch64 installation image as described in the next section.

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 binary blob for the tertiary program loader (TPL). If your have nix installed you can download the latest version with:

nix-store -r $(nix-instantiate --system 'aarch64-linux' --eval --expr 'with import <nixpkgs> {}; "${ubootRock64}"' | sed 's/"//g')

The store path can be take from output nix-store.

Board-specific installation notes

U-Boot needs to be copied to specific sectors on the microSD card, eMMC or image with dd. Download/build U-Boot for the board, and write idbloader.img and u-boot.itb to the correct locations with (replace /dev/mmcblkX with the correct path to the card or image):

dd if=idbloader.img of=/dev/mmcblkX conv=fsync,notrunc bs=512 seek=64
dd if=u-boot.itb of=/dev/mmcblkX conv=fsync,notrunc bs=512 seek=16384

Note: Prior to NixOS 20.03, a downstream version of U-Boot 2017.09 was packaged, which placed U-Boot in a single idbloader.img file. If that version is used, simply disregard the second command above.

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. When using the standard NixOS aarch64 sd image, set console=ttyS2,115200n8 as kernel option in extlinux/extlinux.conf on the boot partition of the sdimage to get a serial linux console. For debugging, console=uart8250,mmio32,0xff130000 should give you an early UART console, before the full serial console is up.

Compatibility notes

	Mainline kernel	ayufan-rock64/linux-mainline-kernel
Ethernet	Works	Works
USB	As of 5.4, USB 3.0 does not work	Works
HDMI	Works	Works

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: The old vendor U-Boot 2017.09 did not leave enough room between the kernel and initrd, causing recent kernels to overwrite the beginning of the initrd. This can be fixed by increasing ramdisk_addr_r in the U-Boot console, or using upstream U-Boot.

Resources

• Official product page