NixOS on ARM/Radxa ROCK5 Model B

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Radxa ROCK5 Model B
Manufacturer	Radxa
Architecture	AArch64
Platform firmware	Vendor BSP
Startup order	SPI NOR Flash, eMMC, SD
Maintainer

The Radxa ROCK5 Model B is a Single-Board Computer with a Rockchip RK3588 SoC.

Support of this system is YMMV (your mileage may vary), and depends on vendor-provided BSP (Board Support Package) based components.

Platform Firmware

Vendor Platform Firmware

Booting the system with the vendor-provided platform firmware may not work due to a known issue in older U-Boot.

If using the vendor-provided platform firmware is desired, renaming the kernel derivation to a shorter name should allow boot to succeed.

Community Repo

A WIP tree to build U-Boot using the infrastructure for Tow-Boot is available.

• https://github.com/samueldr/Tow-Boot/tree/wip/rock5-vendor

This uses a fork with some fixes, so that an installation on the SPI Flash will work, and allow booting from eMMC or SD. NVMe was not successfully validated yet (issues likely hardware-specific).

To build:

nix-build -A radxa-rock5b

Flash result to installation media (sd or mmc)

System configuration

None of the basic components (Kernel, HW acceleration drivers) are available from upstream NixOS.

Building a working system requires additional configuration.

@aciceri's flake

Nix flake for building OS image: https://github.com/aciceri/rock5b-nixos

To build:

nix-build

Flash result to a new second legacy bootable ext4 partition on the installation media

Boot into system

sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake github:jonahbron/config/aciceri-rebooted-into-this#rock5b

Resources

• Official vendor documentation page