NixOS on ARM/FriendlyELEC CM3588

From NixOS Wiki
FriendlyELEC CM3588
A FriendlyELEC CM3588
Manufacturer FriendlyELEC
Architecture AArch64
Bootloader Upstream U-Boot
Boot options microSD, eMMC, SPI NOR Flash, NVMe

The CM3588 is a single board computer built around the Rockchip RK3358 SoC.

There are two configurations of the base version with 4GB RAM or 8GB RAM with 64GB eMMC. The CM3588 Plus variant uses LPDDR5 RAM (instead of LPDDR4) and comes in three configurations (16GB/64GB, 32GB/64GB, 32GB/256GB).

Both variants are typically used with the CM3588 NAS Kit; a daughter board providing 4x NVMe PCIe 3x1 slots, as well as a wealth of other I/O.

Status

This board has upstream U-Boot and kernel support, in part thanks to Collabora's RK3358 mainlining efforts (more features may be present in their downstream kernel). 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 builds in Hydra.

Installation

U-Boot needs to be copied to specific sectors on the microSD card, eMMC or image with dd. Use nixos-aarch64-images to build a CM3588-compatible image from the pre-built NixOS installation images: $ nix-build -A cm3588NAS. Mount and edit image manually to add an SSH key (see networking in the installer).