ROCK 5 in ITX form factor

[willy]

That’s exactly why I suggested a few months ago that high-end ARM-based SBCs are really challenging, because they can still be inferior in performance to some low-to-mid end x86 devices that come with more I/O capability, a very roughly similar termal envelope and equivalent prices. I really wanted to use an RK3588 1.5 year ago for my server, but the mainline status of this beast compared to a boring x86 chip was just apples to oranges.

I anticipate that in the forthcoming years we’ll see more ARM in the datacenter and more Intel on low-power devices because in the end the ones willing to make efforts are those saving money from it at a large scale, while end users just want something that runs out of the box, and when performance, consumption and price are comparable, what remains is ease of use.

[ydeletrain]

Prices are now known and are competitive. I was about to publish an article about my Rock5B-based NAS, but this new board costs less as it can use the 20 pin ATX plug and includes the SATA controller… I guess I will buy it and compare both to make sure the ITX flavor confirms its rank

So, the onboard SATA controller seems to be an ASM1164. I guess 2 of the PCIe 3.0 lanes are used for the purpose and explain why the M.2M slot only offers 2 lanes… now I could still compare to my ASM1166 and JMB585 modules, but since only software RAID is possible, performance on regular HDDs should be very close.

[ydeletrain]

Any advice on a cooler? Finding a simple low profile passive cooler is not so easy, most are proposed with a fan and are not suitable for transversal air flow when the fan is removed.
Maybe a 1U model? Then, it would be nice to cool both the SoC and the memory chips, so a flat base would be better.

[nyanmisaka]

I also received a sample not long ago. IMO any common 115x 1U low profile passive cooler should be overkill for the low power consumption of RK3588. Also, since SoC and RAM chips have different thicknesses, you may need to use thermal paste and thermal pads for them respectively. But considering that the RAM chip is LPDDR5, it doesn’t really matter even if it doesn’t touch the heat sink.

edit: This is the model I’m using. It will not conflict with the onboard RTC battery holder.

[ydeletrain]

@nyanmisaka Thank You for your feedback
Indeed, SoC, eMMc and memory chips only represent 10~15 W of heat to dissipate.
I think cutting a large and light aluminium heatsink like this one is a good and cheaper alternative. Then, using adhesive thermal pads of different heights might allow a sufficient sticky contact. Otherwise, I will have to find a refurbished LGA 115x 1U heatsink or simply wait for delivery of this heatsink

[tkaiser]

Final review update now that the device is ready to be bought and it’s confirmed that eMMC won’t be user-accessible by default: https://github.com/ThomasKaiser/Knowledge/commit/2489492d03db2961d6ac249cc6eefca4687ffa32

[dominik]

thanks for details,
hopefully we will get sooner or later more juice out of ddr5 as we all expect. For now it’s just the number and some chance that higher capacities will be more affordable

[Bret]

Interesting! I’m now trying my 4th cooler on my board as the first 3 just wouldn’t work and they were marked as being LGA 115x compatible. The mounting posts for the backplate were just too wide to go through the holes on the motherboard so here’s hoping 4th time’s the charm

[willy]

Hi all!

I’m also a lucky recipient of this really great board (thanks Radxa!). I’m sharing a few first-contact comments before I forget them:

• the board looks amazingly clean and well arranged. I’m normally not sensitive to PCB colors but this black varnish that hides the copper tracks combined with all the golden pads makes me think of some high-end audio gear Those who love to have a window on their enclosures to exhibit their boards to friends will probably be proud to have something new to show:
  
  
• the connectors and pinouts are well marked. For example you clearly see RJ45-1 and RJ45-2 etc, as well as the front panel’s pinout. That’s one of the advantage of the black paint, the white marking is perfect and uniform so you don’t have any doubt when reading anything:
  
  
• I think that a reset button close to the SPDIF connector (top right above) would be nice during testing or setup. For now I’m making shorts with a screwdriver on the f-panel connector.
• I was surprised to find that the 12V in is on a 2.5mm connector. I searched among all my power blocks (20+) and couldn’t find even a single one in 2.5, all voltages included:
  
  
  
  I found two salvaged male connectors coming from previous PSUs, so I connected one of them to a male 2.1mm connector to make an adapter:
  
  
  
  
  

As an alternative I could have used a 12V->ATX adapter since I have one but I preferred to test the board without extra components first.

• I thought it would be easier to find a heat sink, but I figured I didn’t seem to have the fixing back plate! I started the board without any heat sink and figured that it remains totally cool when idle. Regardless I managed to find one salvaged heat sink + fan + plate kit coming from two different devices that I could mount. I wanted to test it to see if the fan speed could be adjusted:
  

  
  
  
  
  
  I think it could possibly be useful to maybe provide a default plastic plate + long pins that allow to attach “something” with a pair of elastics or serflexes for use during early tests, since it’s likely not going to heat much anyway. I noticed that the fan starts at full speed and its speed significantly drops at the end of the boot, likely when properly set up to only adapt to temperature maybe.

• The UART connector is ordered GND-TXD-RXD as more and more boards these days it seems, so I could directly connect a CH340-based adapter I’m using with some other boards and that supports the default 1.5 Mbauds of Rockchip chips:
  

  

So from a hardware perspective, that’s quite awesome.

However, for now I’m stuck. The system boots on a “roobi” system that I found on the site was a new pre-installer (good idea, that could definitely help). However, I end up with a login prompt and tried many login/password combinations (root, rock, roobi, radxa, even nothing and I don’t remember what), and nothing is accepted. I failed to find the info. I know I’m not good at finding such possibly obvious info but I searched an hour or so, which is already a bit too much for a login/password pair. (At least during this search the SoC remained totally cool without its heat sink). Thus any hint to log in would be more than welcome!

I looked at the boot loader and found that you have approx 1s to choose between 1 and 2 (both end up with this login prompt, the second saying that root account is locked, maybe I did too many attempts?):

Cannot open access to console, the root account is locked.
See sulogin(8) man page for more details.

Press Enter to continue.
...
Debian GNU/Linux 11 roobi ttyFIQ0

roobi login:

It’s also possible to interrupt the boot by pressing Ctrl-C instead of choosing 1 or 2 and end up in u-boot. Partitions 1 and 2 seem to be FAT, part 3 is ext2/3/4 and u-boot by default accesses its kernel there from /boot. But for now I didn’t manage to boot it by hand to pass args and bypass the login.

There are some bluetooth hci0 timeout errors that pollute the console for one minute or so and after that they’re gone.

That’s all for this evening. Once I manage to log into it, I’ll be interested in giving it a try with an M.2 10GbE NIC I bought not long ago, and with 4 SSDs.

[tkaiser]

The system boots on a “roobi” system that

…is most likely meant to be operated with a connected display and keyboard/mouse? Maybe even accessing http://roobi.local/ from another machine on your network works if you use mDNS/ZeroConf?

I guess all you can do the console way is to somehow login, then wipe the eMMC to get the board booting from TF card or something similarly destructive?

[willy]

is most likely meant to be operated with a connected display and keyboard/mouse?

You think so ? I’m not against offering a possibility to install a board via a keyboard and screen (I even encourage it), but I would never expect that one to be the only solution. Yes I came over that page as well and I just considered it irrelevant to my use case, and it spoke about other vendor’s hardware so I didn’t insist.

Hmm I have a HDMI-to-USB capture adapter that I bought for the rare cases I need to connect to HDMI without having to carry a heavy display, I can try. But if that’s it, it would be gross, because the board presents a valid boot prompt, nothing that lets you imagine you’re not supposed to use that. At minimum there should be a usable root/root or so access on the console for those who want a simple install method.

BTW I have not found the board on the network, but I only connected the cable long after I exhausted all my imagination of unusable logins, so maybe it didn’t request an IP address.

But I’ll retry with the HDMI adapter just in case it shows anything, thanks for the suggestion.

[tkaiser]

I would never expect that one to be the only solution

Well, this is stuff for end users. It seems they simply made an Electron app to interact with the user and to setup things which is accessible via display and since being Electron might simply work over a network connection too.

And in case you still want to try local access maybe give ps:ps a try? But how to continue then? Accessing http://127.0.0.1 with a text browser?

Edit: Maybe executing roobi might then work (see here)

[willy]

Well, this is stuff for end users

I understand this but it doesn’t mean that those who know what they want to setup should go via the complicated path. It’s like when some distros didn’t let you run fdisk and/or would always reorder your partitions. On spinning rust you’d definitely want to place the swap closest to the most commonly used data and you’d end up with swap at the end, making the system super slow due to large seeks. I remember finding myself having to install in two steps using a secondary disk to later move the data.
I’ll give the ps:ps a try BTW, thanks for spotting this.

Last point regarding end users, end users install their PC by booting using a USB stick plugged into a USB port, not by using whatever proprietary install system. For example I had no trouble installing my LX2K that boots any regular distro from UEFI. There’s an EDK2 port for RK3588 that also covers Rock5B, I never tested it but it could be a more universal and conventional boot and setup method that targets end users.

[tkaiser]

end users install their PC by booting using a USB stick plugged into a USB port

Correct. And ‘their PC’ is x86.

In this stupid ARM world where each and every SoC needs its own bootloader (at least proprietary DRAM initialization) this simply doesn’t work which is the reason various SBC vendors came up with the idea of preflashing stuff like OOWOW, Roobi or whatever to present the user a list of OS images that contain all the proprietary crap necessary to boot on this specific device.

And this won’t change unless all ARM SoC and SBC vendors start to adopt Arm SystemReady (or whatever the current spec is called that usually has zero relevance for end users since nobody adopts anything of this) and preflash a SPI NOR with a bootloader (already containing all the proprietary crap needed for this specific device) being able to boot generic aarch64 OS images.

[willy]

I agree and that’s exactly my point. That’s also why I asked FriendlyELEC to install the SPI NOR on their latest NanoPC-T6 and to flash it (though I don’t think this last point has been done yet). As a PC user I don’t like UEFI because it’s more complicated than the legacy mode without adding visible value. But for ARM it’s the least painful solution that works for everyone out of the box, and the code exists for RK3588.

[willy]

BTW, ps:ps worked fine on the login prompt (with some script syntax errors but that’s all):

roobi login: ps
Password: 
Linux roobi 5.10.110-33-rockchip #65700d485 SMP Wed Apr 3 04:26:57 UTC 2024 aarch64

The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.

Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
permitted by applicable law.
Last login: Fri May 17 19:29:29 UTC 2024 on tty1
-bash: [: : integer expression expected
-bash: [: : integer expression expected
-bash: [: : integer expression expected
ps@roobi:~$

I also found that the board indeed got a DHCP address, and sending a browser to it indeed shows the roobi interface. Another point that is not great for on-the-table setup is this:

Due to remote access to this device, authentication is required. After clicking the start button,
please press the power button three times within 60 seconds to complete the verification.

/me using the screwdriver again to short pins.

It then allows you to choose an OS image among two, and claims “the medium is not detected” (even when I click on the refresh circle on the right). This is exactly the reason I absolutely hate and despise such proprietary installation tools. Nobody uses them, so they are extremely lightly tested and full of bugs and limitations that make them a total pain to deal with.

Bah, for now I’ll run my tests from this image. It’s already a full-fledged OS, even gcc is installed on it! I don’t know what the intent was for a pre-installation image but it will be useful anyway

[tkaiser]

[Roobi] claims “the medium is not detected”

Is there an installation medium (other than eMMC which should not be user-accessible on Rock 5 ITX by default anyway since it’s Roobi’s place to live)?

[willy]

No, I have not yet added any other one, I naturally expected such a board to have its data on either SATA or M2 and the OS on the eMMC, I mean, what anyone would likely expect on a server board! Sacrifying the eMMC for a boot loader is non-sense, particularly when that means that you’ll either need to move your OS to the data disks or dedicate one drive for the OS. I really don’t understand such baroque choices. If the goal is to make it as irritating as using a Synology NAS I can understand, but I’m not seeing how one sees value in doing that :-/

I’m starting to get a feeling that the board is really awesomely designed from a hardware perspective, maybe one of the best product from Radxa to date, and that some incomprehensible software choices are going to hinder its adoption by spreading words of pain of setup and use :-/ I’m a bit confused.

[willy]

Also, there’s a micro-SD slot on the board that supports UHS mode and reads at 88MB/s from a 64G SD I have here. If there’s one please where the Roobi gadget should be placed, it’s exactly on a micro-SD. Everyone will easily find a spare one, download the Roobi image, place it on the SD and install the OS from there, then eject the SD once finished. No need to sacrify the eMMC for that single-use stuff. And I would strongly prefer to install the OS on an eMMC than on a micro-SD.

[tkaiser]

Everyone will easily find a spare one, download the Roobi image, place it on the SD and install the OS from there

Nope, users fail to select the right OS image (please note: there’s not one Roobi OS install but these are device specific since the SBC vendor doesn’t ship with SPI NOR preflashed with something that would allow to boot generic aarch64 images).

And (even most experienced) users especially with Radxa are not even able to find the images for a specific device.

As for the target audience: Radxa advertises this thing as ‘ARM PC’ and desktop users want their OS on a NVMe SSD since they have heard that MB/s are that great and that important (nobody in that world understands the difference between random and sequential I/O). The average desktop user in front of such an ‘ARM PC’ will never notice there’s eMMC inside since it only contains some ‘firmware’ allowing the OS image of choice to be flashed to an installed SSD in the M.2 slot.