Upcoming Kernel 6.1 & Debian Bookworm update

#1

I’m very exited for the upcoming kernel 6.1 & Debian Bookworm update.
For one I’m an update guy, always meaning to run the latest official software.
But also form a feature standpoint I’m very intrigued.

As I understand it the 6.1 release won’t be a derivate of an Android kernel anymore, but a full-fledged very current (last gen LTS) Linux kernel. This should bring several improvements such as ZFS support. This is especially useful to me, as I’m currently in the process of building a Rock5B NAS, enabled by its 2,5GHz ethernet jack and its PCIe 3x4 M.2 NVMe port. The latter is a great fit for S-ATA extension cards with individual non-shared ports with great parallel bandwidth and RAID support. Additionally the 6.1 release marks the start of the rk3588 SOC upstreaming effort. Although very limited back ports could bring nearly full native board support as it’s within reach by now.

Now I wonder how to proceed. Should I wait for its release?

As rockchip announced a Q4 availability for its kernel SDK and I think, that radxa probably already has beta access and I wonder whether we can expect a release before Christmas. For instance friendlyELEC already posted their upbringing efforts for their rk3588 SOCs on GitHub.
If true I’d just wait setting up my NAS.

In case it would stretch until next year I wonder wether there will be a clean upgrade path from radxa’s current r39 Debian release via some kind of dist-upgrade functionality, so the setup wouldn’t need to be replicated on a new install.

Especially the later question presumably is of greater interest for most users.

#2

Full upstream support will probably never come, like H.264 hardware encoding in RK3399 is still not upstream.

Also it’s possible to build ZFS even with Android Kernel, there are just a couple of lines that needs to be changed in ZFS source code. https://github.com/radxa/kernel/issues/54#issuecomment-1788453183

#3

What makes you think its not the Android kernel? Currently Android 14 is using 6.1 (6.1.62) which supposedly is the Android LTS version. So most likely its going to be that version.

If you want proper mainline then you need to wait until all the features you require are implemented.

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#4

BSP should still be the android derivate but RK3588 is soon mostly fully mainline (thx collabora). But has anybody a mirror of the Radxa 6.1 development since the Gitlab seems to be removed.

#5

Getting the mainline doesn’t mean it’s mature and complete. The BSP kernel will remain a stable choice for a long time to come.

I have a 6.1 branch with device trees added for the common RK3588 SBCs, have been running with it for about a week and it works fine. Note that it is still based on the WIP develop-6.1, RK has not released the final version yet.

#6

I doubt h.264 or anything new ffmpeg will be mainline due to licencing and why the likes of youtube are moving to av1.
Likely it will have to be ported to mainline images, but It think because it was previous to all the licencing arguments it did get mainlined and should work without mpp as now its setup as a mainline hantro decoder/encoder.
Sold my rk3399 a while back so unable to test if true, maybe it is just decode.

#7

I build and installed it without issue. However it refuses to boot falling back to the 6.6.1 kernel.
Your 6.7-rc1+hdmi+gpu+media+drm fails to build for me.

#8

The BSP 6.1 kernel is not compatible with the device tree in mainline, it may be compatible with the previous BSP 5.10 kernel.

Linux rock-5a 6.1.25-legacy-rk35xx #17 SMP Sat Nov 25 08:27:47 UTC 2023 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux

Linux rock-5a 6.7.0-rc1-collabora-rockchip-rk3588 #27 SMP PREEMPT Tue Nov 28 13:15:39 UTC 2023 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux
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#9

It’s really not Android Kernel this time, this commit is their starting point for 6.1: https://github.com/friendlyarm/kernel-rockchip/commit/c1354ca3d7cd71494a6e4cb1f057b98f6ed232d3

They “merged” with Android Kernel by taking the entire 6.1.25 tree verbatim.

Although unfortunately it’s still on 6.1.25, released half a year ago.

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#10

Good find, i see it shares the same commit history up to Linux 6.1.25.

I have access to the Rockchip SDK and will be sure to upload a tag to GitHub when the BSP is released.

#11

You checked that the commit history before the commit is same as linux right? If so thats really great move.

#12

I conducted some further tests, but I have no success regarding the 6.1 build.
Strangely the aforementioned 6.7 branch build perfectly fine when physically triggering the build on my build server instead of doing so via ssh. Regarding my very limited testing it’s working marvellously. What did not, however is enabling rga support. There apparently have been some breaking changes during the 6.5 release cycle regarding the pte_offset_map_lock directives which the build fails on now. I presume the issue lies within drivers/video/rockchip/rga3/rga_mm.c but I could be completely wrong.

#13

I can’t locate the problem based on your description. These are the two defconfigs I use on 6.1 and 6.7 and I have no problems compiling the kernel.

#14

As mentioned previously the kernel from the rk-6.1-dev branch builds fine:
Either with cp rockchip_defconfig rockchip_linux_defconfig, as well as with

cd linux_rockchip
make rockchip_linux_defconfig
make savedefconfig
mv defconfig arch/arm64/configs/rockchip_linux_defconfig

It also installs just fine on my up to date Debian bookworm installation on my Rock 5B. Strangely it does not get added into /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf although mk_linux does run and all the files (vmlinux, dtb, config, system-map, initrd) are installed into /boot. Thus I manually added them to extlinux.conf, however whatever I do this kernel does not boot and instead falls back to whatever other kernel is installed. Like you suggested I also tried the dtb from the BSP kernel.

Regarding the 6.7-rc1-rk3588+hdmi+gpu+media+drm branch I’m currently doing some more testing and will update this post accordingly. So far the kernel builds (make rockchip_linux_defconfig method), installs and boots just fine, but does not advertise /dev/rga. Modifying the kernel config using make menuconfig to enable rga lets the builds fail. Building the kernel using the rockchip_defconfig fails as well.

#15

I’d just like to thank the two forums users here who’ve been working a lot on kernel 6.1 for rk3588 (rock 5a and 5b). These guys are: @nyanmisaka and @boogiepop

Just look at this commit history: https://github.com/hbiyik/linux/commits/linux-6.1-gen-rkr6%2Bpanthor

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#16

The backported panthor is largely working on 6.1 bsp.

Screenshot%20from%202023-12-04%2006-49-26
Screenshot from 2023-12-04 06-49-26.png1920×1080 437 KB

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#17

Can it be patched up to current 6.1.65 without too much effort?

#18

This is the BSP kernel from vendor, so don’t worry too much about the sublevel 25 or 65.

It is currently feasible to backport the panthor from upstream/mainline to 6.1.