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	Needs porting		rockchipdrm/VOP-v2
3D Acceleration	Linux Mainline	Upstream Mesa	panfrost
Video Decode	Linux Staging	Not in ffmpeg[1]	hantro-vpu, using v4l2-requests	Necessary device tree changes in review
Audio	In review[2]		rockchip-i2s-tdm	Downstream: i2s i2s fix vad pdm spdif
	Linux Mainline		rk817-codec	As of 5.14
u-boot	Waiting on ATF sources
Device Tree	Basic Quartz64 Model A device tree in linux-next[3]
Gigabit Ethernet	Linux Mainline		rk3566-gmac	As of 5.14[4]
	Linux Mainline		yt8511-phy	As of 5.14[5]
IOMMU	Linux Mainline		rockchip-iommu	As of 5.14[6]
GPIO	linux-next[7]		gpio-rockchip
pinctrl	Linux Mainline
Thermal Regulation	Linux Mainline		rockchip-thermal	As of 5.14[8]
PCIe	linux-next[9]		pcie-dw-rockchip
Power Management	Linux Mainline		rockchip-pm-domain	As of 5.14[10]
Voltage Control	linux-next[11]		rk3568-pmu-io-voltage-domain
SPI	Linux Mainline		spi-rockchip	As of 5.14[12]
Battery	In review[13]		rk817-charger	In the BSP tree this is handled by rk817_battery.c and rk817_charger.c
Microphone	linux-next[14]		rockchip-saradc	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[15]		rockchip-usb2phy
e-Ink	Needs reversing		ebc-dev?	See RK3566 EBC Reverse-Engineering

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

Partially Working

• PCI-Express Controller — everything but devices that need cache coherency (e.g. dGPUs) should work
• USB 3.0 — only works with very short cables and depends on the device. This is likely due to a hardware design issue relating to the coupling capacitors needed for SATA, which shares the same lines as USB 3.0.
• 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^[16]
• Audio
  • Simple port of downstream i2s-tdm driver for analog audio output exists and works. Needs cleanup/rewrite before it's worthy of being submitted upstream.
  • no HDMI or SPDIF yet

Confirmed Broken

• Nothing!

Needs Testing

• GPU — need a VOP-v2 DRM driver to get display output
• 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.

VOP2 Porting

The VOP2 portion of the rockchip-drm driver needs to be ported from the downstream kernel. This driver enables video output. Preliminary research has determined that this is a fairly big task.

Collabora has an unpolished forward port that has some issues with HDMI, it can be found here: https://gitlab.collabora.com/benjamin.gaignard/for-upstream/-/tree/5.10_for_rockchip

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.

Resources

Repositories

• pgwipeout's kernel tree
  • https://gitlab.com/pgwipeout/linux-next/-/tree/quartz64-5.14
• 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