QuartzPro64 Development

The QuartzPro64 development board

Board back side

A QuartzPro64 Development Wiki page before a QuartzPro64 Wiki page? It's more likely than you think!

This page will be used for both documenting the current development efforts and the board in general, as we don't know yet how a generally available QuartzPro64 will look like so documenting the dev board is probably best left to the development page.

Obtaining a Development Board

Request/Register: https://preorder.pine64.org/#/quartzpro64

Upstreaming Status

Function	Status		Component	Notes
Video Output	Needs porting		VOP2	Collabora said they'll work on this. The video output IP on the RK3588 should mostly be the same as the one on the RK356x, but the chip specific stuff will need to be integrated into the vop2 driver.
Video Input	Needs porting		rk_hdmirx	Huge 3600 line driver, but generally seems to be in good condition
3D Acceleration	Needs writing	Needs writing	panfrost	Collabora said they'll work on this. New architecture, reportedly needs many changes to the kernel component of Panfrost.
Video Decode	Needs writing	GStreamer only, no ffmpeg[1]	hantro using v4l2-requests	VDPU121 handling 1080p60 H.263/MPEG-4, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2
	Needs writing		rkvdec2 using v4l2-requests	Nobody is known to be working on this for now. VDPU346 handling 8K60 H.265, H.264, VP9 and AVS
	Needs writing		rkdjpeg using v4l2-requests	User:CounterPillow is doing a little work on this. VDPU720 handling JPEG
	Needs writing		? using v4l2-requests	Collabora said they'll work on this. VDPU981 handling 4K60 AV1
Video Encode	Needs writing	GStreamer only	JPEG on VEPU121	Driver already exists, only minor changes needed.
	Needs writing	?	H.264 on VEPU580
	Needs writing	?	H.265 on VEPU580
Audio	In review[2]		rockchip-i2s-tdm
	Linux Mainline		es8388 CODEC
CRU	In review[3]		clk-rk3588
MMC	Linux Mainline		sdhci-of-dwcmshc	As of 5.19[4]
pinctrl	Linux Mainline		pinctrl-rockchip	As of 5.19[5]
GPIO	Linux Mainline		rockchip-gpio	As of 6.1[6]
I2C	Linux Mainline		rk3x-i2c	Should be the same as RK3399, just needs devicetree work
SPI	Linux Mainline		rockchip-spi	Should be the same as previous SoCs, just needs devicetree work
PMU	In review[7]		rk806	Talks over SPI
Regulators	Needs porting		rk860	Talks over I2C
GMAC	Linux Mainline		dwmac-rk	As of 6.1[8]
Power Domains	Linux Mainline		rockchip-pm-domain	As of 6.1[9]
CAN	Needs porting		rockchip_canfd	Not broken out on the QuartzPro64, so we probably won't be the ones porting it
SPDIF TX	May need porting		rockchip-spdif	Genuinely just needs the compatible string added, I think, otherwise we're all good. Not broken out on QuartzPro64 dev board
SPDIF RX	Needs porting		rockchip-spdifrx	Not broken out on QuartzPro64 dev board
PCIe	May need porting		rockchip-dw-pcie	Downstream driver and upstream are quite different, look into how much work actually needs doing. Seems to be the same controller as rk3568 so maybe none?
NPU	Needs porting/writing	?	rockchip-rknpu
USB 2.0	?		?
USB 3.0	?		?
SATA	Linux Mainline		ahci-dwc	Just needs the compatible added to the bindings
Thermal	In review[10]		rockchip-thermal

Hardware

The SoC and RAM packages

General

• RK3588 SoC
• 16 GB SK hynix DRAM

Cooler

The board comes with two cooler mounts, a 4-hole mount that appears to be spaced 55x55mm apart, and the ~60mm diagonal "northbridge heatsink" mount the ROCKPro64 and Quartz64 Model A uses.

RK3588 is slightly (<1mm?) taller than the DRAM chips, use a thick enough thermal pad instead of thermal compound.

UART

Plug in the USB-C port labelled "DEBUG PORT" on the QP64 board to another computer with a USB-A-to-C cable.

It will show up as a FT232 USB Serial adapter in lsusb:

$ lsusb
[...]
Bus 005 Device 027: ID 0403:6001 Future Technology Devices International, Ltd FT232 Serial (UART) IC
[...]

Baud rate is 1.5 mbauds or 1500000.

Ensure you have the driver module loaded:

# modprobe ftdi_sio
# lsmod | grep ftdi_sio
ftdi_sio               61440  0
usbserial              53248  1 ftdi_sio
usbcore               290816  7 ftdi_sio,usbserial,xhci_hcd,usbhid,usbkbd,usbmouse,xhci_pci

If the above is not working, check the required driver is supported by your kernel, using one of the following commands:

$ zgrep FTDI_SIO /proc/config.gz
CONFIG_USB_SERIAL_FTDI_SIO=m
$ grep FTDI_SIO "/boot/config-$(uname -r)"
CONFIG_USB_SERIAL_FTDI_SIO=m

Using the dmesg command, you should see something like the following:

[24784.535804] usb 5-3: new full-speed USB device number 3 using xhci_hcd
[24784.710714] usb 5-3: New USB device found, idVendor=0403, idProduct=6001, bcdDevice= 6.00
[24784.710723] usb 5-3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[24784.710725] usb 5-3: Product: FT232R USB UART
[24784.710727] usb 5-3: Manufacturer: FTDI
[24784.710728] usb 5-3: SerialNumber: A10LLO86
[24784.723858] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbserial_generic
[24784.723865] usbserial: USB Serial support registered for generic
[24784.725286] usbcore: registered new interface driver ftdi_sio
[24784.725295] usbserial: USB Serial support registered for FTDI USB Serial Device
[24784.725348] ftdi_sio 5-3:1.0: FTDI USB Serial Device converter detected
[24784.725368] usb 5-3: Detected FT232RL
[24784.731685] usb 5-3: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB0

Then you can get console output from the QP64 with, for example:

screen /dev/ttyUSB0 1500000

Mounting Holes

Can't be bothered to take a precise measurement of all the holes right now, just use some PC standoffs and have the board sit on your desk, it's a dev board after all.

See the PCB layout PDF files, linked in the Documentation section.

Storage

The eMMC on the dev board

• Soldered on 64 GB FORESEE eMMC chip, it comes pre-flashed with some Android (you'll even get a brief bit of HDMI output)
• microSD card slot
• 2x SATA 3.0 (molex power connector for it not populated, but easy to remedy)

Power

Power switch & barrel connector

You can provide power to the board via the 12V barrel connector, it's 5.5mm OD/2.1mm ID barrel 'coaxial' type "M" centre-positive, the ROCKPro64 5A power supply from the PINE64 store will work. (TODO: add alternative ways).

There is a hardware flip switch to power up / down the board.

PMU

The PMU

2x RK806-2, not RK808 compatible. It's a dual PMU configuration where one PMU is a subordinate of the other.

Verify this once we have access to SDK sources.

This may be it, TODO: test it & report.

Ethernet

The RGMII ethernet port (near the SDCARD socket) is working if you use neg2led's linux-quartz64 repo.

The other port (near the sound jack) is hooked to the SoC via PCIe and is currently not working.

Boot

The board can boot from the following interfaces:

• SPI
• eMMC
• SD/MMC

TODO: in which priority / order are those boot options tried ?

TODO: Add brickability informations

Immediate TODOs

Enable cpufreq Stuff

Current neggles kernel has the CPU at 1.2 GHz, apparently sre has patches to enable cpufreq?

Add RK3588 Support To VOP2

VOP2 IP on the RK3588 is very similar to the one on the RK356x, but it still needs platform specific code added.

Ways To Do Things

Using rkdeveloptool

Use the PINE64 fork of rkdeveloptool.

Connect a USB-C cable to the "DEBUG PORT" USB-C port, and a second to the "DOWNLOAD" USB-C port. Cable direction for the latter matters, so if it doesn't show up after entering download mode, try rotating the USB-C connector to the other side!

Interrupt the boot by mashing Ctrl+C very quickly on the serial comms, then type download to enter rockusb download mode.

$ rkdeveloptool list

should now show you the device somewhat like this:

$ rkdeveloptool list
DevNo=1 Vid=0x2207,Pid=0x350b,LocationID=204    Loader

Note: If you receive an error about being unable to create the comms object in the following steps, make sure you have the udev rules installed with CounterPillow's RK3588 device id patch, install them to /etc/udev/rules.d/ and udevadm control --reload

Now, we can e.g. show the partitions on the eMMC:

$ rkdeveloptool list-partitions
#   LBA start (sectors)  LBA end (sectors)  Size (bytes)       Name                
00                 8192              16383       4194304       security
01                16384              24575       4194304       uboot
02                24576              32767       4194304       trust
03                32768              40959       4194304       misc
04                40960              49151       4194304       dtbo
05                49152              51199       1048576       vbmeta
06                51200             133119      41943040       boot
07               133120             329727     100663296       recovery
08               329728            1116159     402653184       backup
09              1116160            1902591     402653184       cache
10              1902592            1935359      16777216       metadata
11              1935360            1937407       1048576       baseparameter
12              1937408            8310783    3263168512       super
13              8310784          120831935   57610829824       userdata

You can now use rkdeveloptool write-partition partitionname yourfile to overwrite one of the eMMC partitions.

U-Boot + Kernel On SD, RootFS On eMMC

This is the setup User:CounterPillow currently uses. In short, you'll need a vendor U-Boot on your SD card, with a boot partition on it that contains your extlinux.conf, device tree and kernel.

Setting Up The SD Card

Assuming your SD card is /dev/sdX, partition as e.g. follows:

# parted -s /dev/sdX mklabel gpt
# parted -s /dev/sdX mkpart loader 64s 8MiB
# parted -s /dev/sdX mkpart uboot 8MiB 16MiB
# parted -s /dev/sdX mkpart env 16MiB 32MiB
# parted -s /dev/sdX mkpart efi fat32 32MiB 544MiB    # increase size as you wish
# parted -s /dev/sdX set 4 boot on

Flash SPL and u-boot:

# dd if=rk3588_spl_loader_v1.06.109.bin of=/dev/sdX1
# dd if=uboot.img of=/dev/sdX2

Then make the filesystem:

# mkfs.vfat -n "efi" /dev/sdX4

Mount it to e.g. /mnt/sdcardboot:

# mount /dev/sda4 /mnt/sdcardboot

Put the following in /mnt/sdcardboot/extlinux/extlinux.conf:

default l0
menu title QuartzPro64 Boot Menu
prompt 0
timeout 50

label l0
menu label Boot Jank Kernel SDMMC
linux /jank
fdt /dtbs/rockchip/rk3588-evb1-v10.dtb
append earlycon=uart8250,mmio32,0xfeb50000 console=ttyS2,1500000n8 root=/dev/mmcblk0p14 rw rootwait

Copy your kernel to /mnt/sdcardboot/jank and your DTB to /mnt/sdcardboot/dtbs/rockchip/rk3588-evb1-v10.dtb.

Unmount it, we're done with the SD card.

Creating The Root File System

First, allocate a file the size of your desired root partition (larger sizes will take longer to transfer, don't make the same mistakes as CounterPillow did), here we choose 16G:

$ fallocate -l 16G rootpart.bin

then, make the filesystem on it. CounterPillow went for ext4 because nobody has ever been fired for using ext4:

$ mkfs.ext4 rootpart.bin

Cool, now mount it:

# mount rootpart.bin /mnt/emmc-root

Now we'll download the Arch Linux ARM generic rootfs tarball and go to town:

$ wget -N http://os.archlinuxarm.org/os/ArchLinuxARM-aarch64-latest.tar.gz{,.sig}
$ curl 'https://keyserver.ubuntu.com/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x68b3537f39a313b3e574d06777193f152bdbe6a6' | gpg --import=-    # in case you're lacking the key
$ gpg --verify ArchLinuxARM-aarch64-latest.tar.gz.sig    # don't you dare skip this
# bsdtar -xpf ArchLinuxARM-aarch64-latest.tar.gz -C /mnt/emmc-root    # notice that this is run as root

Then we just need to edit fstab. Get the UUID (not PARTUUID) from lsblk:

$ lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,MOUNTPOINTS,UUID

and put it in /mnt/emmc-root/etc/fstab as follows:

UUID=root-uuid-here  /       ext4    defaults        0       1

Unmount /mnt/emmc-root, we're done with it.

Flashing The Root File System With RockUSB

Warning: This will destroy whatever data is on that userdata partition. But you're here to run Linux, not Android, right?

Plug one USB-C cable into the debug UART port, the other into the download port. Yes you will need two USB-C cables (or A-to-C cables) for this, get over it.

Plug in your board, reset it while hammering Ctrl+c on the debug UART until you get into a u-boot command line. Now enter the download command.

If your device doesn't show up in lsusb or rkdeveloptool list command, pull out the download USB-C plug, rotate it axially by 180 Euler degrees, and plug it back in.

Next, flash the partition. Depending on the size of it, this can take over an hour:

$ rkdeveloptool write-partition userdata rootpart.bin

Booting

Unplug the download USB-C cable once done.

Put the SD card in the board. Reset it. You can now boot and your rootfs on eMMC will be mounted and contains an ALARM userland.

To update kernels or the device tree, just shut down the board, take out the SD card, write a new kernel or dtb to it, and plug it back in. No more need for rkdeveloptool, yay.

Using neg2led's kernel branch

If you use the linux-quartz64 branch from neg2led's kernel fork (see Resources for a link). The uSD card reader is working and you can use a partition on it for the root FS. This will eliminate the need to use rkdeveloptool.

Create the additionnal partition:

# parted -s /dev/sdX mkpart root ext4 544MiB 4GiB

Mount it:

# mount /dev/sda4 /mnt/sdcardroot

Extract the ALARM rootfs tarball in there:

# bsdtar -xpf ArchLinuxARM-aarch64-latest.tar.gz -C /mnt/sdcardroot    # notice that this is run as root

Find the right device your SD card will be (by booting neg2led's kernel once and looking at the boot log). Then modify "root=" from extlinux/extlinux.conf, for example:

root=/dev/mmcblk1p5

Resources

Kernel

• The linux-rockchip mailing list archives
• linux-rockchip patchwork
• neg2led's mainline kernel repository with patches picked from the mailing list
• Sebastian Reichel's (SRE) rk3588 branch

Misc

• The quartz64 and quartz-dev channels on the PINE64 chats (bridged IRC, Matrix, Discord and Telegram)
• PINE64 rkdeveloptool fork
• CounterPillow's uboot-qp64 repository, used with the official rkbin repository

Documentation

The various documents relating to the chips and board haven't been publicly released yet, but if you do have a QuartzPro64 board User:CounterPillow will happily provide the documentation for you if you ask him in the PINE64 chats. We have the following:

• RK3588 TRM Part 1 and Part 2
• RK860 datasheet including register descriptions
• RK806 datasheet including register descriptions
• RK3588 hardware design guide, machine translated to English from Chinese, and the original Chinese copy
• QuartzPro64 schematics
• QuartzPro64 PCB top layout
• QuartzPro64 PCB bottom layout