Booting a BSP kernel on the rock960 board Before hacking the board, I want to evaluate it and for this, a kernel supporting the board is needed. Hopefully there is a full debian image with a 4.4 kernel available at varms.com. The image partitions layout is described on the 96boards web site . I prefer to use the SD card to install the system. As my console is setup, I can simply power up the board with the micro SD card inserted in and see what happens. After a few seconds, I have a prompt :) The kernel version is 4.4.103 , debian is 9.2 Supported features Network Wifi was not tested but it appears to work for the "iwlist scanning" with some warnings "wl_escan_handler : escan is not ready ndev" The ethernet - USB adapter with an asix AX88772B is detected and the network works fine Power management The idle states are managed through PSCI, there are three states (WFI, cpu sleep and cluster sleep), the characteristics for each cluster are
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The 96boards - rock960 My goals with this board The rock960 showed interesting technical characteristics, I wanted to acquire this board and have fun. The decision to spend some money on this board was greatly influenced by the upstream support. It may not be complete but I know Heiko Stubner, maintainer of the rockchip platform, is doing a great job so it would be a question of time before having all the bits supported mainstream. My goal is to have this board working with an upstream kernel, if it is close to full support, I'm perfectly fine to contribute and bring my stone to the edifice. Ordering the board There are two versions of this board, a light one with 2GB of memory and 16GB of eMMC and a stronger one with 4GB of memory and 32GB of eMMC. I choose the later because, by experience, advanced benchmarking programs often blow memory and are impossible to run on a 2GB system without triggering the Out-Of-Memory killer (swap is not an option for obvious reason