Quartz64 Building U-Boot

This article guides you through compiling U-Boot for a Quartz64 or SOQuartz device.

Prerequisites

You will need either an x86 machine with an aarch64 cross-compiler installed, or an existing aarch64 system. You will also need the device tree compiler dtc, python3 (including setuptools and pyelftools), swig, GNU make and git.

On an x86_64 Arch Linux system, you can install the required dependencies with:

pacman -S --needed base-devel aarch64-linux-gnu-gcc aarch64-linux-gnu-binutils git dtc python-setuptools swig python-pyelftools

Fetching The Repositories

Use git to clone the mainline U-Boot repository into the directory u-boot:

git clone https://source.denx.de/u-boot/u-boot.git

You can use git checkout tagname inside the u-boot directory to check out a specific git tag (release), you can list all of them with git tag -l (but do keep in mind we only have device support since v2023.10).

Then, also use git to clone the rockchip firmware binaries repository into the directory rkbin:

git clone https://github.com/rockchip-linux/rkbin.git

Setting Up Your Environment

Next, we need to set two environment variables: ROCKCHIP_TPL for the DRAM init binary, and BL31 for the ARM Trusted Firmware binary.

cd u-boot
export ROCKCHIP_TPL="$(ls ../rkbin/bin/rk35/rk3566_ddr_1056MHz_v*.bin | sort | tail -n1)"
export BL31="$(ls ../rkbin/bin/rk35/rk3568_bl31_v*.elf | sort | tail -n1)"

Configuring U-Boot

First, we need to use the right default config for our device. Please choose defconfig from the following table depending on your device:

Board	defconfig
Quartz64 Model A	quartz64-a-rk3566_defconfig
Quartz64 Model B	quartz64-b-rk3566_defconfig
SOQuartz on Model A	soquartz-model-a-rk3566_defconfig
SOQuartz on Blade	soquartz-blade-rk3566_defconfig
SOQuartz on CM4 I/O Board	soquartz-cm4-rk3566_defconfig

In the u-boot directory with your environment variables set, run:

make CROSS_COMPILE=aarch64-linux-gnu- defconfig

with defconfig being the value from the previous table.

Building U-Boot

In the u-boot directory, after configuring, and with your environment variables set, run:

make CROSS_COMPILE=aarch64-linux-gnu- -j$(nproc)

This will output a u-boot-rockchip.bin, which is your freshly built SPL+U-Boot combined image.