NixOS on ARM/PINE64 ROCKPro64

← Back to NixOS on ARM

PINE64 ROCKPro64
Manufacturer	PINE64 (Pine Microsystems Inc.)
Architecture	AArch64
Bootloader	Upstream U-Boot
Boot options	microSD, eMMC, SPI NOR Flash

The ROCKPro64 is a powerful single board computer built around the Rockchip RK3399 SoC.

There are two models of the board, with 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/ubootRockPro64.aarch64-linux

Board-specific installation notes

You can use nixos-aarch64-images to get an rockpro64 compatible disk image or running the commands manually as described below:

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.

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 ROCKPro64 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

See https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/ROCKPro64#GPIO_Pins for list of all pins

The serial console runs at 1500000 baud in the bootloader.

To connect check your dmesg for an identifier of the serial console:

[78635.965459] usb 2-1: new full-speed USB device number 8 using xhci_hcd
[78636.119008] usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=1a86, idProduct=7523, bcdDevice= 2.63
[78636.119017] usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=0, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
[78636.119022] usb 2-1: Product: USB2.0-Serial
[78636.127103] ch341 2-1:1.0: ch341-uart converter detected
[78636.142043] usb 2-1: ch341-uart converter now attached to ttyUSB0

In our example that coresponds to the ttyUSB0 which makes a new device available at /dev/ttyUSB0 to which you can connect using for (example) picocom:

# Connect to /dev/ttyUSB0 at baud 1500000
$ picocom -b 1500000 /dev/ttyUSB0

See https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/ROCKPro64#Setup_a_Serial_Console_.28UART.29 for more information on setting up the serial console

Note: It is not recommended to connect the serial adapter to pin 10 (RX) while booting, as this often causes the board to hang early in the bootloader. Disconnecting pin 10 still allows the serial console to be viewed, and it can be reconnected after the board boots, allowing interaction with the console.

Downstream kernel

Although the mainline kernel contains a device tree for the ROCKPro64, it does not seem to boot correctly as of 4.20. Therefore it is 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.

Custom NixOS Installer

It is possible to build a custom nixos installer image with a downstream kernel that will boot as-is on the rockpro64. For a working example see this repo: nixos-installer-rockpro64

Panfrost GPU Driver

The ROCKPro64's GPU is supported by the open source Panfrost driver. The downstream ayufan-rock64/linux-mainline-kernel is known to work. The mainline kernel may also work, but has not been tested. At the time of writing, support has been added to the required userspace libraries, but the changes have not yet been released. It is therefore necessary to build libdrm, mesa, mesa-glu and kmscube from their respective git sources.

Resources

• Official product page