Building U-Boot
This article guides you through compiling U-Boot for a Quartz64 and SOQuartz device.
Prerequisites
You will need either an x86 machine with an aarch64 cross-compiler installed, or an existing aarch64 system. You will also need the device tree compiler dtc, python3 (including setuptools and pyelftools), swig, GNU make and git.
Arch Linux
On an x86_64 Arch Linux system, you can install the required dependencies with:
pacman -S --needed base-devel aarch64-linux-gnu-gcc aarch64-linux-gnu-binutils git dtc python-setuptools swig python-pyelftools
Debian
On an x86_64 Debian (or derivates such as Ubuntu) system, you can install the required dependencies with:
apt install device-tree-compiler build-essential gcc-aarch64-linux-gnu binutils-aarch64-linux-gnu make python3 python3-dev libssl-dev python3-pyelftools python3-setuptools swig git
Fetching the repositories
Use git to clone the mainline U-Boot repository into the directory u-boot:
git clone https://source.denx.de/u-boot/u-boot.git
You can use git checkout _tagname_ inside the u-boot directory to check out a specific git tag (release), you can list all of them with git tag -l (but do keep in mind we only have device support since v2023.10).
Then, also use git to clone the rockchip firmware binaries repository into the directory rkbin:
git clone https://github.com/rockchip-linux/rkbin.git
Setting up your environment
Next, we need to set two environment variables: ROCKCHIP_TPL for the DRAM init binary, and BL31 for the ARM Trusted Firmware binary.
cd u-boot
export ROCKCHIP_TPL="$(ls ../rkbin/bin/rk35/rk3566_ddr_1056MHz_v*.bin | sort | tail -n1)"
export BL31="$(ls ../rkbin/bin/rk35/rk3568_bl31_v*.elf | sort | tail -n1)"
Configuring U-Boot
First, we need to use the right default config for our device. Please choose defconfig from the following table depending on your device:
| Board | defconfig |
|---|---|
| Quartz64 Model A | quartz64-a-rk3566_defconfig |
| Quartz64 Model B | quartz64-b-rk3566_defconfig |
| SOQuartz on Model A | soquartz-model-a-rk3566_defconfig |
| SOQuartz on Blade | soquartz-blade-rk3566_defconfig |
| SOQuartz on CM4 I/O Board | soquartz-cm4-rk3566_defconfig |
In the u-boot directory with your environment variables set, run:
make CROSS_COMPILE=aarch64-linux-gnu- _defconfig_
with defconfig being the value from the previous table.
Building U-Boot
In the u-boot directory, after configuring, and with your environment variables set, run:
make CROSS_COMPILE=aarch64-linux-gnu- -j$(nproc)
This will output a u-boot-rockchip.bin, which is your freshly built SPL+U-Boot combined image.
