A QuartzPro64 page before a QuartzPro64 release? 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.

Upstreaming status

Hardware

General

• RK3588 SoC (8 cores: 4x A76 at 2.4 GHz + 4x A55 at 1.8 GHz)
• Mali G610MC4 GPU (4x Valhalla cores)
• 16 GB of LPDDR4X (SK hynix)
• 64 GB eMMC (Foresee, soldered)
• 1x USB-C (with video-alt mode)
• 1x USB-C (FTDI debug UART, FT232RL)
• 1x USB 3.0
• 2x USB 2.0
• 1x HDMI in
• 2x HDMI out
• 1x PCIe 3.0 slot (open-ended)
• 1x SD / TF card slot
• 2x SATA ports
• 2x Gigabit Ethernet (1x from SoC, 1x on PCIe, RTL8211F, RTL8111HS)
• 1x Wi-Fi & Bluetooth module (AMPAK Tech AP6275PR3)
• 2x SMA Antenna
• 2x MIPI DPHY
• 1x MIPI D/C PHY
• 1x MIPI CSI
• 1x PWM Fan header (four pins)
• 1x RTC battery socket (CR1220, 3 V, see QuartzPro64 board schematics PDF, page 21)
• 1x MIC (soldered)
• 1x audio output 3.5 mm jack
• DC 12 V power input

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

Mounting holes are 3 mm in diameter, so standard standoffs can be used, preferably the 2.5 mm variant. See also the PCB layout PDF files, linked in the documentation section of the Resources page.

The height from the bottom of the PCB to the top of the USB ports as the tallest components is 18 mm, which can be used as a data point for selecting the suitable standoff length to place some acrylic top cover over the board. However, that doesn’t account for the heatsink that needs to be mounted on the RK3588 SoC, for which a suitable rectangular hole can be cut in the top cover.

Storage

• Soldered 64 GB FORESEE eMMC chip, which comes pre-flashed with some Android build
• One microSD card slot
• Two SATA 3.0 ports (standard Molex power connector is not populated)

Power

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

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.

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 reported working (on the matrix channel) with latest neggles kernel.

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 unbricking informations (for example: can the SPI be rewritten with rkdeveloptool)

TODOs

Enable cpufreq Stuff

Current neggles kernel has the CPU at 1.2 GHz, apparently SRE has patches to enable cpufreq? (see in Resources)

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.

To enter rockusb mode, interrupt the boot by holding the “V+/REC” on-board button or mashing Ctrl+C very quickly on the serial comms, then type download.

$ rkdeveloptool list

should now show you the device somewhat like this:

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

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 and 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

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

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.

Resources

Kernel

• The linux-rockchip mailing list archives
• linux-rockchip patchwork
• neggles / neg2led’s mainline kernel repository with patches picked from the mailing list
• Sebastian Reichel’s (SRE) rk3588 branch
• Rockchip BSP kernel tree
• Collabora RK3588 integration branch
• Collabora Mainline Status Table
• Radxa kernel tree, for reference, a lot is happening here

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
• Rockchip OpenSource wiki
• rockchiprs (rkdeveloptool replacement written in Rust)

Documentation

The documentation for the QuartzPro64 board and most of the documentation for the chips it uses hasn’t been publicly released yet, but if you do own a QuartzPro64 board, the users CounterPillow and Dsimic will happily provide the documentation to you for the research or development purposes, if you ask them in the PINE64 chat channels. We’ve got the following documents, some of which can also be found elsewhere on the Internet rather easily:

• RK3588 datasheet
• RK3588 technical reference manual (TRM), parts 1 and 2
• RK3588 hardware design guide, machine translated to English from Chinese, and the original version in Chinese
• RK860 datasheet, including register descriptions
• RK806 datasheet, including register descriptions
• QuartzPro64 schematics
• QuartzPro64 PCB top layout
• QuartzPro64 PCB bottom layout
• AMPAK-Tech AP6275PR3 (Wi-Fi and Bluetooth module) datasheet
• AMPAK AP6275P (Wi-Fi and Bluetooth module) datasheet

Recovery

In the case you erase the eMMC and are unable to boot the board, you can use rkdeveloptool to recover the board. While you can use the Pine64 Fork, it is recommended to use cypheon’s Fork until some Pending PRs are merged in to resolve issues with larger files. This is important when working with the larger 64 GB eMMC on the QuartzPro64.

With rkdeveloptool installed, you will also need the rk3588_spl from rockchip to init the memory/flash when in maskrom mode. This can be downloaded from the rockchip-linux/rkbin repo.

Entering maskrom can be done in a variety of ways:

• Hold the maskrom button (little white button labelled “MASKROM” next to SATA socket) during powerup, OR
• Enter rockusb mode, and execute “rkdeveloptool reboot-maskrom”.
• Bork your eMMC and SD devices (how? erase?), in which case bootup will fallback to maskrom.

Dumping the eMMC

Boot the device into maskrom mode, and then verify rkdeveloptool can see the board. # rkdeveloptool list

DevNo=1	Vid=0x2207,Pid=0x350b,LocationID=503	Maskrom

Once the board shows up, load the rk3588_spl you downloaded earlier, and verify that the eMMC can be seen.

**# rkdeveloptool boot ./rk3588_spl_loader_v1.08.111.bin**
Downloading bootloader succeeded.
**# rkdeveloptool read-flash-info**
Flash Info:
 	Manufacturer: SAMSUNG, value=00
 	Flash Size: 59000 MB
 	Flash Size: 120832000 Sectors
 	Block Size: 512 KB
 	Page Size: 2 KB
 	ECC Bits: 0
 	Access Time: 40
 	Flash CS: Flash<0>

You can now dump the eMMC using the read command. Note that first you have to calculate the eMMC size, which can be done using the output from the previous flash info command. You need to take the sector count, and times it by the sector size, to get the total number of bytes. So in the above example, 120832000*512 so the total flash size is 61865984000.

Using the calculated size, you can now dump the eMMC. Please note this will take 1-2 minutes.

**# rkdeveloptool read 0x0 61865984000 ./quartzpro64_emmc_dump.bin**
Read LBA to file (0%)
...
Read LBA to file (100%)

You now have a full dump of the entire eMMC (SHA256 62cb4ae8d02aeacccf231fa1d00087cdc74b599790a274569305693aa205318d). Note that you can also use the list-partitions and read-partition commands to dump specific partitions, but this only shows GPT partitions on the eMMC. Because of this, it will NOT include the spl_loader found in the first 4MB of the eMMC!

Flasing the eMMC

Boot the device into maskrom mode, and then verify rkdeveloptool can see the board. # rkdeveloptool list

DevNo=1	Vid=0x2207,Pid=0x350b,LocationID=503	Maskrom

Once the board shows up, load the rk3588_spl you downloaded earlier, and verify that the eMMC can be seen.

**# rkdeveloptool boot ./rk3588_spl_loader_v1.08.111.bin**
Downloading bootloader succeeded.
**# rkdeveloptool read-flash-info**
Flash Info:
	Manufacturer: SAMSUNG, value=00
	Flash Size: 59000 MB
	Flash Size: 120832000 Sectors
	Block Size: 512 KB
	Page Size: 2 KB
	ECC Bits: 0
 	Access Time: 40
 	Flash CS: Flash<0>

You can now flash the device using either the write command, or write-partition command, depending on what you are trying to do. If you are looking to restore the entire eMMC from a backup you made, you would use the command below to accomplish this.

**rkdeveloptool write 0 ./quartzpro64_emmc_dump.bin**