Quartz64 Development

This page documents the current status of software support for the Quartz64 single-board computer, and provides links to resources to help prospective contributors get started. Information is kept current on a best-effort basis as various patches get accepted into the kernel.

Overview

Upstreaming Status

Function	Status		Component	Notes
Video Output	In review[1]		rockchipdrm/VOP-v2	Also needs the DTS changes by mriesch[2]
3D Acceleration	In review[3]	Upstream Mesa	panfrost	GPU is basically already supported in mainline but needs some device tree changes for this particular SoC
Video Decode	Linux Staging	Not in ffmpeg[4]	hantro-vpu, using v4l2-requests	Necessary device tree changes in review
Audio	Linux Mainline		rockchip-i2s-tdm	As of 5.16[5]
	Linux Mainline		rockchip-spdif	As of 5.15[6]
	Linux Mainline		rk817-codec	As of 5.14[7]
u-boot	Waiting on ATF sources
Device Tree	Linux Mainline		Quartz64 Model A	As of 5.16[8]
	Needs submitting		Quartz64 Model B
	Needs submitting		SOQuartz
	Needs writing		PineNote
Gigabit Ethernet	Linux Mainline		rk3566-gmac	As of 5.14[9]
	Linux Mainline		yt8511-phy	As of 5.14[10]
IOMMU	Linux Mainline		rockchip-iommu	As of 5.14[11]
GPIO	Linux Mainline		gpio-rockchip	As of 5.15[12]
pinctrl	Linux Mainline
Thermal Regulation	Linux Mainline		rockchip-thermal	As of 5.14[13]
PCIe	Linux Mainline		pcie-dw-rockchip	As of 5.15[14]
Power Management	Linux Mainline		rockchip-pm-domain	As of 5.14[15]
Voltage Control	Linux Mainline		rk3568-pmu-io-voltage-domain	As of 5.15[16]
SPI	Linux Mainline		spi-rockchip	As of 5.14[17]
Battery	In review[18]		rk817-charger	In the BSP tree this is handled by rk817_battery.c and rk817_charger.c
Microphone	Linux Mainline		rockchip-saradc	As of 5.15[19]. Headphone jack mic seems to connect to SARADC_VIN2_HP_HOOK, so I'm pretty sure that the dtsi and driver changes are needed for that mic to work
USB 2.0	In review[20]		rockchip-usb2phy
e-Ink	Needs reversing		ebc-dev?	See RK3566 EBC Reverse-Engineering
Combo PHY	In review[21]		naneng-combphy

Current Status

The following sections give an overview over the current status of different parts of the board. Some parts are waiting on a driver to be written or ported, others only need various adjustments.

According to pgwipeout, I/O device performance is within expected ranges now.

Working

• eMMC
• SDMMC0 (SD cards)
• GMAC (Gigabit Ethernet)
• USB 2.0
• SATA 2
• SATA 3
• UART
  • UART 0 (Pi-bus)
  • UART 1 (Bluetooth)
  • UART 2 (Pi-bus, debug)
• Video Decode
  • VP8
• Battery
• GPU

Partially Working

• PCI-Express Controller — everything but devices that need cache coherency (e.g. dGPUs) should work
  • User:CounterPillow noticed some weirdness with NVMe devices disconnecting during heavy write operations, needs investigating
• SDMMC1 (Wi-Fi) — AP6256 working, BL602 needs some work to make it flash firmware
• I²C — works but is not yet exposed to the Pi-bus
• GIC — needs errata published by Rockchip to get upstream to add device-specific workarounds^[22]
• Audio
  • Analog audio works
  • SPDIF works
  • no HDMI yet
• Video Output — only at 1920x1080p60 and nothing else, very buggy and rough around more than just the edges

Confirmed Broken

• USB 3.0 — only works with very short cables and depends on the device. This is due to a hardware design issue relating to the coupling capacitors needed for SATA, which shares the same lines as USB 3.0.
  • Hardware design changes have been suggested to engineers, it's in their hands now.

Needs Testing

• E-Paper — needs EBC driver
• SPI

TODO

ebc-dev Reverse Engineering and Development

The driver for the eInk panel needs to both be reverse engineered and then rewritten as C. In its current form, it is mostly an assembly dump produced by gcc with debug symbols. See RK3566 EBC Reverse-Engineering for details.

Investigate MCU

The RK3566 comes with an integrated RISC-V microcontroller (MCU). It communicates with the A55 host through the Mailbox system driven by the rockchip-mailbox driver. Since this MCU would be quite useful for things such as low power standby mode, investigating how it can be turned on and have firmware flashed to it should greatly enhance the power saving features of the PineNote.

Mainline U-Boot Work

Currently, mainline U-Boot does not have support for the RK3566 SoC used on the Quartz64. That's why we currently use the "downstream" Rockchip U-Boot, which is based on an old version of U-Boot and contains vendor specific patches that have not undergone the same level of code review as they'd have done had they been submitted upstream.

While the lack of ATF sources mean that using mainline U-Boot would still require the use of Rockchip provided binaries for the firmware, the mainline U-Boot works needs to be done eventually anyway, and even with Rockchip blobs, a more modern version of U-Boot will be much nicer to use.

Someone needs to get on the task of investigating what minimally needs to be ported to get the board booting with mainline U-Boot, port those changes, and submit them for review.

List of Useful Resources for this Task

• Downstream Rockchip U-Boot repository with Quartz64 specific patches: https://gitlab.com/pgwipeout/u-boot-rockchip/-/tree/quartz64
• Mainline Rockchip custodian U-Boot repository: https://source.denx.de/u-boot/custodians/u-boot-rockchip
• U-Boot Mailing List: https://lists.denx.de/listinfo/u-boot

Resources

Repositories

• pgwipeout's kernel tree
  • https://gitlab.com/pgwipeout/linux-next/-/tree/quartz64-v5.15-rc1
• BSP based development effort for SPL/U-Boot and Linux
  • https://gitlab.com/pine64-org/quartz-bsp
• Image CI pipeline aimed at developers
  • https://gitlab.com/pgwipeout/quartz64_ci/
• Rockchip U-Boot
  • https://github.com/rockchip-linux/u-boot
• Downstream rockchip-linux kernel tree
  • https://gitlab.com/pine64-org/quartz-bsp/rockchip-linux

Other

• Rockchip-SoC Patchwork Page
  • https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-rockchip/list/
• Rockchip Kernel Mailing List Archive
  • https://lore.kernel.org/linux-rockchip/

Board/SoC Documentation

Booting

Boot Order

The RK3566 boot ROM will search for a valid ID BLOCK in the following order on the support boot media:

• SPI NOR flash
• SPI NAND flash
• SD-Card
• eMMC

... if this fails, the boot ROM will initialize the USB0 port and wait for a connection from the Rockchip flash/boot tools.

Bootloader Flashing

As per pgwipeout's commit message:

• Make a partition named uboot as partition number 1 at 8 MiB to 16 MiB
• dd if=idblock.bin of=/dev/<mmc/sd> seek=64
• dd if=uboot.img of=/dev/<mmc/sd>1