I recently obtained one of the newly-released (- to the ‘public’..) Pine64 ARM64 systems…    My first reaction, was that it is a bit on the large side..  The board is over twice the size of the Odroid C2..

Pine64 ARM64.

As usual, the ‘standard’ U-Boot was a heavily-customised old version, that only mounted Android-format Kernel ‘blob’s, but a hacked version of this – which loads standard ARM64 ‘Image’ kernels, is available, and I used the one from the Debian/Longsleep image referenced on the Wiki:  http://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/Main_Page.

I substituted a Fedora 24 aarch64 root filesystem, and everything worked OK.

Fedora 24 (Twenty Four)
Kernel 3.10.65-7-pine64-longsleep on an aarch64 (ttyS0)

I then tried the patched 4.7-rc1 kernel from here:  https://github.com/apritzel/linux/tree/a64-v5.    I found that this did boot, if the Kernel config was left unchanged after ‘make defconfig’..

Fedora 24 (Twenty Four)
Kernel 4.7.0-rc1+ on an aarch64 (ttyS0)
.............................
# uname -a
Linux rgpine 4.7.0-rc1+ #1 SMP PREEMPT Tue Jun 7 05:01:18 EDT 2016 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux

I found that the networking did not work, and so had to select this (ST Microelectronics / STMMAC / Allwinner GMAC), and this is still being tested, along with other deselections of ‘unwanted’ options..    I had originally just selected ‘Allwinner..sunxi..’ under the ‘Platform selection’ option, but this did not boot…      The aprinzel kernel is still very much work-in-progress, and there should be later versions soon..

I did try a patched version of the mainline U-Boot, from here:  https://github.com/apritzel/u-boot/tree/pine64 , and I did get it to load (boot0 plus u-boot image) and run, but the resulting kernel boot (using a known/good kernel) was unsuccessful…

...................
[ 160.236247] platform reg-81x-cs-rtc: Driver reg-81x-cs-rtc requests probe deferral
[ 160.245014] platform reg-81x-cs-aldo1: Driver reg-81x-cs-aldo1 requests probe deferral
[ 160.254129] platform reg-81x-cs-aldo2: Driver reg-81x-cs-aldo2 requests probe deferral
[ 160.263626] platform reg-81x-cs-aldo3: Driver reg-81x-cs-aldo3 requests probe deferral
[ 160.272743] platform reg-81x-cs-dldo1: Driver reg-81x-cs-dldo1 requests probe deferral
[ 160.281947] platform reg-81x-cs-dldo2: Driver reg-81x-cs-dldo2 requests probe deferral
[ 160.291064] platform reg-81x-cs-dldo3: Driver reg-81x-cs-dldo3 requests probe deferral
[ 160.300165] platform reg-81x-cs-dldo4: Driver reg-81x-cs-dldo4 requests probe deferral
[ 160.309310] platform reg-81x-cs-eldo1: Driver reg-81x-cs-eldo1 requests probe deferral
[ 160.318427] platform reg-81x-cs-eldo2: Driver reg-81x-cs-eldo2 requests probe deferral
................. etc...........etc................

One other thing to watch..   I did get the wifi/bluetooth plug-on daughter board, but this became extremely hot, after a short while, and I removed it..

Robert Gadsdon.   January 7, 2016.