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:
      • Little cluster
        • cpu sleep: latency 370, residency 900
        • cluster sleep: latency 900, residency 2000
      • Big cluster
        • cpu sleep: latency 370, residency 900
        • cluster sleep: latency 900, residency 2000
      • Having the big and little clusters with the same idle characteristics make me think we have an area of improvements here :)
    • The cpufreq driver is also supported, it is the DT based cpufreq driver:
      • Little cluster: 408MHz 600MHz 816MHz 1GHz 1.2GHz 1.4GHz
      • Big cluster: 408MHz 600MHz 816MHz 1GHz 1.2GHz 1.4GHz 1.6GHz 1.8GHz
    • It is surprising there is no freq above 1.8GHz for the Big cluster because usually these cores can go higher in freq, moreover the technical specifications tell the freq can go up to 2GHz
    • There are two thermal zones, one for the SoC and one for the GPU
    • The EAS is also part of the kernel features

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