Quartz64 Installing Arch Linux ARM

This page is a work in progress. It's not a tutorial you can follow yet. Wait for the 5.16 kernel release.

Commands to be run as a normal user are prefixed with $, commands to be run as root are prefixed with #. We assume your target device is /dev/sdb, adjust accordingly.

Partitioning The Block Device

TODO

Fetching and Flashing U-Boot

TODO

Fetching The Root File System Tarball

Fetch the root filesystem tarball over HTTPS from the de3 mirror, the autoselect mirror is broken and will sometimes feed you mirrors with broken HTTPS, and you can't get the GPG keys to verify the tarball anywhere.

$ wget https://de3.mirror.archlinuxarm.org/os/ArchLinuxARM-aarch64-latest.tar.gz{,.md5}

Verify that the file survived the transfer (i.e. the connection didn't get interrupted prematurely). This provides no security against maliciously modified tarballs, just aborted transfers:

$ md5sum -c ArchLinuxARM-aarch64-latest.tar.gz.md5

Installing The Root File System

Don't prefix the bsdtar command with sudo, run it from an interactive root shell as done here with sudo -i. At least the ALARM instructions claim this matters

$ sudo -i
# mount /dev/sdb5 /mnt/alarm-root
# mount /dev/sdb4 /mnt/alarm-root/boot
# bsdtar -xpf ArchLinuxARM-aarch64-latest.tar.gz -C /mnt/alarm-root

Editing fstab

Find your partition UUIDs for both partitions using lsblk:

$ lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,MOUNTPOINTS,PARTUUID

In /mnt/alarm-root/etc/fstab, put the lines

PARTUUID=root-uuid-here  /       ext4    defaults        0       0
PARTUUID=boot-uuid-here  /boot   vfat    defaults        0       1

with your UUIDs in place of the placeholder.

Writing extlinux.conf

Create a /mnt/alarm-root/boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf with these contents:

default l0
menu title Quartz64 Boot Menu
prompt 0
timeout 50

label l0
menu label Boot Arch Kernel SDMMC
linux /Image
fdt /dtbs/rockchip/rk3566-quartz64-a.dtb
append initrd=/initramfs-linux.img earlycon=uart8250,mmio32,0xfe660000 console=ttyS2,1500000n8 root=/dev/mmcblk0p5 rw rootwait

For eMMC instead of SD, replace /dev/mmcblk0p5 with /dev/mmcblk1p5.

For a different type of Quartz64 device (e.g. Model B) replace the fdt line with the appropriate /boot-relative path to the device tree.

Once done, unmount the partitions:

# umount /mnt/alarm-root/boot
# umount /mnt/alarm-root