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 | Downstream (ayufan) U-Boot[1] |
| Boot options | SD, 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
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.
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 This bootloader is not entirely open, incorporating blobs for the tertiary program loader (TPL) and ARM trusted firmware (ATF).
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 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 |
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).