ARM64 – Pine64 – Not Exactly ‘Compact’..
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.
Just wanted to thank you a lot for the idea of just replacing root! It didn’t occur to me that getting Fedora to PINE64 would be that easy this way. 🙂 So big THANKS!
Hey, have you investigated F24 on the Pine64 further? I’d like to try this as well.
I have Fedora 24 running on the Pine, but the system is not too stable, with the ancient 3.xx kernel.. Not had time to investigate putting an up-to-date kernel on it, yet..
RG.