Mainline support for RockPi 4?

#1

Hi radxa-team,
do you have plans supporting the RockPi 4 board upstream to get a recent kernel running on the board? Or does it not yet make sense since many functions are missing on mainline. I have no idea of the current situation of RK3399 boards, tbh.

#2

We have tested mainline kernel 4.19 on ROCK Pi 4. Currently the status are:

  • booting into console and debian desktop
  • ethernet and usb works fine

issues:

  • hdmi no audio
  • hdmi resolution no higher than 1080p, no edid
  • wifi/bt not tested yet
  • csi/dsi not tested
    …

There are some work to do for the mainline kernel. I will update when we have more found.

#3

Hey Jack,

Great to see that you will be looking to push your device tree and upstream into mainline.

I’m interested in LibreElec and I believe this will be a big thing in making that possible. Given the hardware and sales point the Rock Pi 4 could be a great media device!!

#4

@jack Thank you for your answer. I appreciate the transparency. Looking forward to any news.

@rav101 You’re probably coming from here: RockPi4 support of LibreELEC? One of the LibreELEC members writes there, they would need the device-tree in the mainline kernel to support the board. That might take some time though, since there have to be done reviews by the kernel maintainers. But submitting the device-tree rather sooner than later gives them the chance to start tinkering with the board.

#5

That’s correct @Antram,

It would be good if the developers could add an early “Work In Progress” device tree to mainline kernel so the review process can happen sooner rather than later and more kernel developers can review and suggest improvements. It should move the whole process along a lot quicker and lead to additional support for this board from other parts of the Linux community.

Really hope @jack is able to take this forward?!

#6

It’s coming.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/1/1/8

Booting log: https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/62SYScSRzn/

Thanks Akash from Mentor.

#7

That is great news,

I have my board on order though it will likely take some time to arrive. It’s great to see progression in this area as I’m sure it will open up much more development opportunities for different distro’s and in turn help this community with more choice!!

#8

update:

https://www.mail-archive.com/linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org/msg1898464.html

ROCK Pi 4 device tree is accepted in kernel 5.1.

#9

5.1 ？
4.9.20 should be the best choice.

#10

Hi @jack,

Thanks a lot for the combined team’s work on this! I don’t know a lot about Linux, I have just moved over from Window’s on my PC and so I’m learning all about it at the moment.

From what I understand, Linux kernel 5.0 is currently at RC1 stage. There will likely be multiple RC’s before we hit the final 5.0 release kernel (I think 4.20 had 6 RC’s). After that, the process will start for Linux Kernel 5.1 before it is eventually accepted. Is this correct, and if so can we guess at a rough timeline for when this patch will therefore eventually be in mainline kernel?

Additionally, I was wondering how LTS kernels work and whether patches from newer kernels automatically make it into older but LTS kernel releases or whether patches need to be submitted for those LTS kernels separately?

#11

Great news. I’ve been burned by SoC vendors that bake their own kernel and then basically abandon the device, which doesn’t work for me at all, so I’m happy to see that this won’t happen here.

#12

Does that mean that if the patch is accepted I can use any Linux distribution running kernel 5.1 and not being dependent on the distributions radxa is offering?

#14

Just checking in,

From what I understand, Linux kernel 5.1 might be released today. Would be great to get an update from the team as next steps for updates etc.

#15

Also just checking in. What does it mean for the Rockpi4 now that 5.1 has been released? What are the plans or expectations? Thx

#16

Mainline kernel is still missing some functions.

Here is the test build of the LibreELEC on mainline kernel.

http://kwiboo.libreelec.tv/test/LibreELEC-RK3399.arm-9.1-devel-20190512180245-bdfaff1-rock-pi-4.img.gz

For what works, please check: https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread/17540-early-mainline-images-for-rk3288-rk3328-and-rk3399/

#17

Hi @jack,

When you say the mainline kernel is missing some functions I’m curious as to what functions are missing and what the next steps would be to resolve this?

Are we talking about another patch being submitted to mainline which I guess would now go into 5.2? Or is this something that can be resolved by taking the mainline kernel and adding the required functions to release a fully working kernel?