Where has the RockPi 4C documentation and images gone

#1

As an occasional visitor to the Radxa pages I’m finding difficult to (re-) find documentation and up-to-date images for RockPI 4C (not 4C+ but 4C).

I’ve been using Debian minimal images have found that the Armbian Community build kernel looses the display port (so one ends up flying blind - particularly if you’ve borked the network config - can’t the ash).

Basically where are the good starting points for 4C users.

Thanks

#2

I apologize for the poor documentation, we plan to rewrite the documentation for the rock 4 series in docs.radxa.com, until then you can ask any questions you may have in this forum and we will try to help you as much as we can.

#3

Thanks, can you point me at the most uptodate Armbian image that has a kernel that will drive the mini HDMI port on the RockPI 4C. The most recent community images fail to drive the display screen, and indeed fail to boot when the PENTA SATA HAT is installed.

#4

ok, and can you send me the image link that you download?

#5

Hi,

Here are links to two images that I have tried:

https://github.com/armbian/community/releases/download/25.2.0-trunk.293/Armbian_community_25.2.0-trunk.293_Rockpi-4c_bookworm_current_6.12.8_minimal.img.xz

and

https://xogium.performanceservers.nl/archive/rockpi-4c/archive/Armbian_23.11.1_Rockpi-4c_bookworm_current_6.1.63.img.xz

When the first of these images boots with the 6.12.8 kernel it does so without driving the HDMI display attached to the min-HDMI connector. It can be ssh’ed via the network. “sudo apt update; sudo apt upgrade” advances the kernel (“linux-image-current-rockchip64”) to version 6.12.11 which fails to boot. The ‘blue’ heartbeat LED flashes twice during the boot process and then stays off (this with the PENTA HAT installed).

When I use the second of these images, with the 6.1.63 kernel, it DOES drive the HDMI display. Using “apt-mark” to prevent kernel, firmware and bsp updates, “apt update; apt upgrade” then updates the rest of Armbian to 24.11.1.

I have just tried the latest community image at:

https://github.com/armbian/community/releases/download/25.2.0-trunk.439/Armbian_community_25.2.0-trunk.439_Rockpi-4c_bookworm_current_6.12.12_minimal.img.xz

with the 6.12.12 kernel. That again fails to drive the HDMI display. I does boot and the ‘blue’ heartbeat LED blinks twice at about half-second intervals - but the wired eth0 networking does not seem to come up, so no SSH and without a display I am somewhat blind.

My concern is to stay current/up-to-date with a working kernel version that continues to drive the HDMI display. I can ‘pin’ the kernel updates for now, but in the long run I really ought to be taking the updates.

Thanks,

Stuart

#6

This is probably less to do with PENTA and more to do with the Armbian kernel, maybe you need to get feedback from the Armbian community。