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 | Applies To | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Video Output | Linux Mainline | rockchipdrm/VOP2 | As of 5.19-rc1Source,Also featured in Phoronix ArticleSource, 4k@30 support and other improvements in 6.4-rc1Source | ||
| Needs porting | rockchip-edpphy-naneng | Downstream: Source and Source Coordinate any porting with Rockchip first | |||
| Linux Mainline | dw-mipi-dsi-rockchip | As of 6.1Source | |||
| 3D Acceleration | Linux Mainline | Upstream Mesa | panfrost | As of 5.18Source | |
| Video Decode | Linux Mainline | GStreamer only, no ffmpegSource | hantro using v4l2-requests | VDPU121 handling 1080p MPEG-2, VP8 and H.264. Mainline as of 5.19Source | |
| Needs writing | rkvdec2 using v4l2-requests | VDPU346 handling 4K H.265, H.264 and VP9 | |||
| Needs writing | rkdjpeg using v4l2-requests | VDPU720 handling JPEG, User:CounterPillow is working on this | |||
| Video Encode | Linux Mainline | GStreamer only | JPEG on VEPU121 | Hantro-based. Mainline as of 6.1Source | |
| Needs writing | ? | H.264 on VEPU121 | Hantro-based | ||
| Needs writing | ? | VP8 on VEPU121 | Hantro-based | ||
| Needs writing | ? | H.264 on VEPU540 | rkvenc-based | ||
| Needs writing | ? | H.265 on VEPU540 | rkvenc-based | ||
| Audio | Linux Mainline | rockchip-i2s-tdm | As of 5.16Source | ||
| Linux Mainline | rockchip-spdif | As of 5.15Source | |||
| Linux Mainline | rk817-codec | As of 5.14Source. | Quartz64 Model A/B | ||
| Bootloader | In reviewSource | TF-A | |||
| Merged | U-Boot | #mainline_u_boot_work[See below]. Quartz64 and SOQuartz as of v2023.10-rc2Source | |||
| In progressSource | Tianocore EDK II | ||||
| Device Tree | Linux Mainline | Quartz64 Model A | As of 5.16Source | Quartz64 Model A | |
| Linux Mainline | Quartz64 Model B | As of 5.19Source | Quartz64 Model B | ||
| Linux Mainline | SOQuartz | As of 5.19Source | SOQuartz | ||
| Linux Mainline | PineNote | As of 5.18Source | PineNote | ||
| Gigabit Ethernet | Linux Mainline | rk3566-gmac | As of 5.14Source | ||
| Linux Mainline | yt8511-phy | As of 5.14Source | |||
| IOMMU | Linux Mainline | rockchip-iommu | As of 5.14Source | ||
| GPIO | Linux Mainline | gpio-rockchip | As of 5.15Source | ||
| pinctrl | Linux Mainline | ||||
| Thermal Regulation | Linux Mainline | rockchip-thermal | As of 5.14Source | ||
| PCIe | Linux Mainline | pcie-dw-rockchip | As of 5.15Source | ||
| Power Management | Linux Mainline | rockchip-pm-domains | As of 5.14Source | ||
| Voltage Control | Linux Mainline | rk3568-pmu-io-voltage-domain | As of 5.15Source | ||
| SPI | Linux Mainline | spi-rockchip | As of 5.14Source.Necessary device tree changes in review. | ||
| Battery | Linux Mainline | rk817-charger | As of 6.1Source | Quartz64 Model A, PineNote | |
| Microphone | Linux Mainline | rockchip-saradc | As of 5.15Source. 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 | Linux Mainline | rockchip-usb2phy | As of 5.17Source | ||
| e-Ink | In review (RFC)Source | rockchip-ebc | A DRM driver is available here; See also RK3566 EBC Reverse-Engineering | ||
| Combo PHY | Linux Mainline | naneng-combphy | As of 5.18Source. Still requires DTS changes | ||
| RGA | Linux Mainline; Could be improved | rockchip-rga | As of 6.5Source. Note that there’s still a ‘4GB’ problem and it’s implementations has room for improvements (to put it midly Source and Source) | ||
| Fan Controller | Needs writing | gp7101 | Someone should write a pwm driver for it so we can then use pwm-fan | SOQuartz Blade | |
| CSI Camera | Needs porting | rkisp | Downstream: Source | ||
| Linux Mainline | rockchip-inno-csidphy | As of 6.1Source | |||
| NPU | Needs writing | Downstream version is a closed source SDK and open source kernel module rknpu. Major undertaking to reimplement this as Linux does not (yet) appear to have a generic architecture for neural accelerators. | |||
| Crypto | Needs porting | rk-crypto v2 | Downstream driver (link) doesn’t include a rk3568 compatible either, but the TRM shows that it seemingly matches. | ||
| TRNG | In reviewSource | rockchip-rng | |||
| Wi-Fi | Needs porting | bes2600 | A downstream driver is available but it makes use of some custom Rockchip interfaces and is designed for older kernels, plans are being made to port it to DKMS. | PineTab 2 | |
| Linux Mainline | brcmfmac | Quartz64 Model B |
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
- H.264
- Video Encode
- JPEG (it’s pretty bad)
- Battery
- GPU
- Video Output
- HDMI
- DSI
- Audio
- Analog audio works
- SPDIF works
- HDMI works
- SPI — works, user needs to modify device tree to add devices
- I^2^C — works, user needs to modify device tree to add devices
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, likely down due to power draw on one of the rails as the same sustained bandwidth could be achieved with a different PCIe device with no issue.
- SDMMC1 (Wi-Fi) — AP6256 working, BL602 needs some work to make it flash firmware
- GIC — needs errata published by Rockchip to get upstream to add device-specific workarounds ^link:https://lore.kernel.org/linux-rockchip/CAMdYzYrQ5f-mv_VmTq_CRf9tR=\j3mwRpKHNLmPFgCF9whsGFRw@mail.gmail.com/[link]^
Confirmed Broken
USB 3.0 (applies to Model A only) — 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.- Fixed in newer revisions by leaving SATA unpopulated
- RGA — only works with memory ≤ 4 GiB, because Rockchip didn’t make the address registers larger. Oopsie.
Needs Testing
- E-Paper
- Microphone Input
- CSI — needs CIF driver
- eDP — needs PHY driver and controller driver
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.
The user liamur did some investigation into the MCU and found that it is disabled by TF-A on suspend, and doesn’t reside in a low-power part of the RK3566 anyway. It does however have access to most of the chip and could be used as (for example) a real-time coprocessor.
Mainline U-Boot Work
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 means that using mainline U-Boot would still require the use of Rockchip provided binaries for the firmware, even with Rockchip blobs, a more modern version of U-Boot will be much nicer to use.
Mainline U-Boot contains good enough support for the RK3566 SoC used on the Quartz64 as of v2023.07 and have support for Quartz64 and SOQuartz as of v2023.10-rc2. Drivers for ethernet GMAC and Motorcomm PHY are supported as of v2024.01-rc1.
Things that could be done
This list is non-exhaustive as we don’t exactly know how much is missing
- Port a basic VOP2 driver to get a framebuffer from u-boot
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
eDP Driver Porting
The eDP PHY driver and controller driver needs to be ported, brought into shape and submitted with proper commit attribution to the Rockchip authors.
User:CounterPillow has experimentally ported stuff, but it’s currently not working.
Linux Kernel Config Options
CONFIG_SND_SOC_ROCKCHIP_I2S_TDM- for Analog and HDMI audio
CONFIG_SND_SOC_RK817- for Analog audio on the Model A
CONFIG_STMMAC_ETH- Ethernet
CONFIG_DWMAC_ROCKCHIP- Ethernet
CONFIG_MOTORCOMM_PHY- Ethernet PHY for Model A, set this one to Y, m won’t work out of the box if the generic PHY driver is y and binds first. Alternatively tell users in board-specific setup instructions to force including the
motorcommmodule in initramfs if you set it to m.
- Ethernet PHY for Model A, set this one to Y, m won’t work out of the box if the generic PHY driver is y and binds first. Alternatively tell users in board-specific setup instructions to force including the
CONFIG_REALTEK_PHY- Ethernet PHY for Model B
CONFIG_MMC_DW- MMC/SD
CONFIG_MMC_DW_ROCKCHIP- MMC/SD
CONFIG_MMC_SDHCI_OF_DWCMSHC- MMC/SD
CONFIG_PCIE_ROCKCHIP_DW_HOST- PCIe
CONFIG_PHY_ROCKCHIP_NANENG_COMBO_PHY- PHY for PCIe/SATA/USB3
CONFIG_DRM_PANFROST- GPU
CONFIG_SND_SOC_ROCKCHIP_SPDIF- SPDIF audio
CONFIG_ROCKCHIP_DW_HDMI- HDMI PHY
CONFIG_PHY_ROCKCHIP_INNO_DSIDPHY- MIPI DSI DPHY
CONFIG_ROCKCHIP_VOP2- Video output
CONFIG_ARCH_ROCKCHIP- General SoC support
CONFIG_ROCKCHIP_PHY- General SoC support
CONFIG_PHY_ROCKCHIP_INNO_USB2- USB 2
CONFIG_RTC_DRV_RK808- Real-time Clock
CONFIG_COMMON_CLK_RK808- Real-time Clock
CONFIG_MFD_RK808- Various things relating to the RK817 chip
CONFIG_CHARGER_RK817- RK817 charger
CONFIG_REGULATOR_RK808- Voltage regulators
CONFIG_ROCKCHIP_PM_DOMAINS- Power management domains
CONFIG_GPIO_ROCKCHIP- GPIO support
CONFIG_PINCTRL_ROCKCHIP- GPIO and general SoC support
CONFIG_PWM_ROCKCHIP- PWM support
CONFIG_ROCKCHIP_IOMMU- IOMMU support
CONFIG_ROCKCHIP_MBOX- Mailbox support (for communication with MCU)
CONFIG_ROCKCHIP_SARADC- Analog-to-digital conversion support, for e.g. microphones
CONFIG_ROCKCHIP_THERMAL- Temperature sensor and thermal throttling support
CONFIG_SPI_ROCKCHIP- SPI support
CONFIG_VIDEO_HANTRO_ROCKCHIP- Hardware video decoder support
CONFIG_ROCKCHIP_IODOMAIN- General SoC support so your I/O pins have the right voltage
CONFIG_COMMON_CLK_ROCKCHIP- Common clock support
CONFIG_PHY_ROCKCHIP_INNO_CSIDPHY- MIPI CSI DPHY
CONFIG_I2C_RK3X- I2C support
Resources
Repositories
- pgwipeout’s kernel tree
- BSP based development effort for SPL/U-Boot and Linux
- Image CI pipeline aimed at developers
- Rockchip U-Boot
- Downstream rockchip-linux kernel tree
- Tianocore EDK II port for UEFI on Quartz64
- Mainline U-Boot Port by pgwipeout
Other
- Rockchip-SoC Patchwork Page
- Rockchip Kernel Mailing List Archive
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
- eMMC
- SD-Card
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
ubootas partition number 1 at 8 MiB to 16 MiB dd if=idblock.bin of=/dev/_<mmc/sd>_ seek=64dd if=uboot.img of=/dev/_<mmc/sd>_1
