Terrible first experience

#1

So first thing I did was try to get it to boot from USB. I should have been a bit more savvy on reading. But okay.

I slapped in an NVME drive and an SD card. SD card had the recommended debian boot image on it.

It booted up. Yay! However the resolution was something like 800x600.Hm. Settings let me up it to 1920x1080 and no higher. So no joy on the 1440 p monitor then?

I noticed several windows carried detritus of corruption around with them around the edges. Like gray squares and such. That’s odd.

I ran sudo apt-get update
and sudo apt-get upgrade.

I rebooted.

And that was the end of that. Now it won’t boot.

I noticed it has a tendency to power cycle multiple times on my PD power device before settling in at 20V and 0.25A or so. That’s a hardware fault. I’m worried there’s a hardware fault with the GPU.

Moreso since doing an apt upgrade seems to brick that OS install to a flashing cursor and nothing more.

Compared to the Rock 4 or the Pi this is an execrable first experience. I wanted to use this as a micro desktop for casual stuff. This is not trustworthy or reliable at all. I’m reading about a lot of PD issues - luckily mine seems to work - at least some boot cycles it catches. I can’t see me recommending this.

#2

What makes you believe this?
I noticed same graphical issue the first time I booted debian but seems gone when using armbian.
For power cycle, same for me unfortunately. On armbian booted from NVMe have to plug/unplug PD several times until it catches up and accept to boot.
Can do with it for now, but hope it will be solved later…

If all reported issues can be solved through software, this is acceptable to me, but hardware issues would be really annoying.

#3

My monitor works on 4k60 with rock5b. You need to add 8k overlay in /boot folder. I don’t know why radxa not doing it by default.

Overlays are:
rock-5b-hdmi1-8k.dtbo
rock-5b-hdmi2-8k.dtbo

#4

Hello.

What are these HDMI overlay files? I’ve not heard of this before and Googling isn’t explaining it.

Thanks!

#5

Think about it as drivers. Since it’s close impossible to change low-level drivers on SoC - there is overlay, that just slap new config on top of existing one by tweaking some values.

#6

Oh OK. Because on a desktop device you’d swap in a new video card? Is that how you mean?

#7

Not really. On desktop you would need to upgrade firmware of videocard

1 Like
#8

I was mostly referring to the PD power issue. But graphics corruption - squares being carried with a window - looks off, and as I said, I was worried. Not remotely convinced, but a bit worried.

After getting some sleep, I find that it was booting, but is indeed reporting that it cannot work out what the monitor is. (It’s an AOC model, nothing weird).

So as @cdome points out, it’s probably something to do with adding overlays. Need to find out how to do that!

#9

ls /boot/dtbs/5.10.110-34-rockchip-gca15bbe36e6c/rockchip/overlay/display
/boot/dtbs/5.10.110-34-rockchip-gca15bbe36e6c/rockchip/overlay/rock-4c-plus-radxa-display-10fhd.dtbo
/boot/dtbs/5.10.110-34-rockchip-gca15bbe36e6c/rockchip/overlay/rock-4c-plus-radxa-display-10hd.dtbo
/boot/dtbs/5.10.110-34-rockchip-gca15bbe36e6c/rockchip/overlay/rock-4c-plus-radxa-display-8hd.dtbo
/boot/dtbs/5.10.110-34-rockchip-gca15bbe36e6c/rockchip/overlay/rock-5b-radxa-display-10hd.dtbo
/boot/dtbs/5.10.110-34-rockchip-gca15bbe36e6c/rockchip/overlay/rock-5b-radxa-display-8hd.dtbo
rock@rock-5b:~$

rock@rock-5b:~$ sudo radxa-add-overlay.py -i rock-5b-hdmi1-8k.dtbo
Overlay not found.
rock@rock-5b:~$

Welp. More research.

#10

Ah! For anyone else looking, just use the name: rock-5b-hdmi1-8k without the dtbo

Doesn’t seem to have actually helped it boot with a display, however.