Thinking about firmware and hardware description for latest Rockchip platforms

[Jonas Karlman]

Hi,

On 2024-10-22 18:53, Shimrra Shai wrote:

[snip]

> However, because
> of the need to have a specific device tree blob file for each board
> along with the kernel, one cannot just use the typical USB stick and
> install process at least with the commonly used bootloaders assuming
> a PC architecture.

U-Boot now use latest Linux device tree for all RK35xx boards (and older
Rockchip aarch64 SoCs). With the EFI feature of U-Boot you can already
boot any distro raw aarch64 image, as long as the kernel is new enough.

E.g. for RK356x you can use latest debian, ubuntu, opensuse and freebsd
aarch64 raw/uefi image and boot into the installer from a USB stick.

However, there is no display support in U-Boot for RK35xx so you will
have to use serial console to do the installation, and be sure to leave
around 16 MiB of space on SD-card/eMMC before first partition to not
overwrite any existing bootloader.

Btw, regarding the EDK2 RK35xx port, please consider to update to use
mainline U-Boot SPL and not a vendor SPL blob, you could also benefit
from using binman to generate the final firmware image, bundling the
ddr init blob, U-Boot SPL and EDK2 in a firmware package.

Regards,
Jonas

[snip]