NixOS on ARM/PINE64 ROCKPro64
The ROCKPro64 is a powerful single board computer built around the Rockchip RK3399 SoC.
| PINE64 ROCKPro64 | |
|---|---|
| |
| Manufacturer | PINE64 (Pine Microsystems Inc.) |
| Architecture | AArch64 |
| Bootloader | Upstream U-Boot |
| Boot options | microSD, eMMC, SPI NOR Flash |
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
It can also be cross compiled with
nix-build '<nixpkgs>' --argstr system aarch64-linux -A ubootRockPro64 --out-link ubootRockPro64
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
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 ttyUSB0In 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
$ nix-shell -p picocom --run "picocom /dev/ttyUSB0 -b 1500000"
See https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/ROCKPro64#Setup_a_Serial_Console_.28UART.29 for more information on setting up the serial console