[Seeking Help] RK3568 (Rock 3A) ISP & VPU support on Armbian (Kernel 6.1.115) for YOLO Inference

ROCK 3 Series 3A
1

Background: To use the latest NPU 0.9.8 runtime for YOLO inference, I switched from the official Debian 11 image (which only has NPU 0.8) to Armbian_26.2.1_Rock-3a_trixie_vendor_6.1.115_minimal.img. While the NPU environment is working correctly, I am facing two major blockers when capturing video streams via GStreamer:

The Issues:

  1. Missing ISP Control (rkaiq_3A_server): The system lacks the 3A server and matching IQ files. As a result, my IMX219 camera produces extremely dark images due to the lack of auto-exposure and gain control.

  2. Missing VPU Plugins: There are no hardware-accelerated GStreamer elements (e.g., mppjpegenc, mppvideodec). Software encoding/decoding is causing high CPU usage and significant lag.

My Questions:

  1. Is there a pre-built rkaiq_3A_server binary or a compilation guide compatible with this specific vendor kernel (6.1.115)?

  2. How can I install or build the Rockchip MPP GStreamer plugins on this Armbian build to enable hardware acceleration?

  3. Alternatively, is it recommended to manually upgrade the NPU Runtime to 0.9.8 on the official Debian 11 image? If so, are there specific steps to avoid breaking the ISP pipeline?

Any guidance from the engineers or the community would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

2

0.9.8 is NPU kernel driver, and not runtime and you can’t install it manually, because you need to have rockchip source code to configure and build the kernel.

Runtime is called rknpu2 and you can update it manually if older driver of your Debian distro supports it.
To install runtime you just need to copy its files in their folders.

3

I just checked armbina vendor build and it have problems running NPU na GPU
How you know NPU is working?
Check for errors with:

gmesg | grep fde6000

dmesg | grep fde4000

If you see errors it doesn’t work

4

thanks, Logic_Facts,it is already the rock-3a_bookworm_kde,but only r1.

i have successfully run yolo5 by npu,