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

FunctionStatusComponentNotesApplies 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

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; also see 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

  • I2C — 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

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

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 motorcomm module in initramfs if you set it to m.

  • 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

Other

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 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