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dimtass / meta-nanopi-rockchip64

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meta-nanopi-rockchip64

This Yocto BSP meta-layer currently supports the following boards:

The layer is based on the armbian image and it uses the same u-boot and kernel patches as also other customizations found in the Armbian image. The patches are located in:

Also the patcher is ported from armbian and actually is the same for u-boot and the kernel and is lcated in scripts/armbian-patcher.sh.

How to use the layer

Create a folder for your project, then create a folder inside and name it sources. You have to use that name.

Cloning the needed layers

Then git clone this repo inside with poky and meta-openembedded.

cd sources
git clone https://bitbucket.org/dimtass/meta-nanopi-rockchip64.git
git clone --depth 1 -b dunfell git://git.yoctoproject.org/poky
git clone --depth 1 -b dunfell git@github.com:openembedded/meta-openembedded.git

Note: This layer is compatible with warrior, zeus and dunfell.

Setting the environment

Then from the top directory that includes the sources run this command:

ln -s sources/meta-nanopi-rockchip64/scripts/setup-environment.sh .
ln -s sources/meta-nanopi-rockchip64/scripts/flash_sd.sh .

Then your top dir contects should look like this:

flash_sd.sh
setup-environment.sh
sources

To setup the environment you need to choose the target SBC and set the MACHINE variable and then run the script like this fromt the top directory:

MACHINE=nanopi-neo3 source ./setup-environment.sh build

This will setup the project and create a build/ folder. Note that by default the poky distro is used. Also, by default in this image all the Linux firmware files are added in the image. If you want to save ~500MB then you can comment out the next line, but then you need to add the specific firmware for your MACHINE with your own recipe:

IMAGE_INSTALL += "armbian-firmware"

By default this repo is applying all the extra patches that armbian applies in its images. Those are the aufs and a few extra wifi drivers. This is enabled by default in the local.conf file and you can disable this by setting the following variables to no instead of yes, which is the default.

EXTRAWIFI = "yes"
AUFS = "yes"

Note: For kernel versions > 5.4.x WIREGUARD is not used anymore, so always leave it to off.

Supported images

Currently there is only one supported image which is meant for testing the layer only and it's this one:

This image is provided only for testing purposes, therefore normally you should define your own image or use this as a template and extend it further.

Control image extra space

Currently the extra free space for the image is set to 4GB. You can control the size with the ROOT_EXTRA_SPACE variable in classes/rk-create-wks.bbclass. If you want to remove all additional space then set it to 0.

Build the image

To build the image use this command:

bitbake rk-console-image

This will build a console-only image.

Current versions

Build the SDK

There's a known issue that some bb recipes that are used while the SDK is built conflict with some packages. In this BSP the packages that are conflict are the listed in the SDK_CONFLICT_PACKAGES variable, which is located in meta-nanopi-rockchip64/classes/package-groups.inc. Therefore, in case you add more packages in the image and the SDK is failing, then you can add them in the SDK_CONFLICT_PACKAGES.

Then, when you setup the environment to build the image using the meta-nanopi-rockchip64/scripts/setup-environment.sh script, you can control if those packages will be added with the REMOVE_SDK_CONFLICT_PKGS variable in the local.conf. By default this is set to 0, but when you build the SDK you need to set that to 1.

To bulid the SDK run this command (after the environment is set)

bitbake -c populate_sdk rk-console-image

Overlays

This layer supports overlays for the rockchip boards. In order to use them you need to edit the recipes-bsp/u-boot/files/rkEnv.txt file or even better create a new layer with your custom cofiguration and override the rkEnv.txt file by pointing to your custom file in your recipes-bsp/u-boot/u-boot_2020.07.bbappend with this line:

SRC_URI += "file://rkEnv.txt"

Of course, you need to create this file and place it in your layer file folder. In that file you need to edit it and add the overlays you need, for example:

extra_bootargs=
rootfstype=ext4
verbosity=d
overlays=rockchip-i2c7 rockchip-spi-spidev
param_spidev_spi_bus=0

Flashing the image

After the image is build, you can use bmaptool to flash the image on your SD card. To this you first need to install bmap-tools.

sudo apt-get install bmap-tools

Then you need to run lsblk to find the device path of the SD and only after you verified the correct device then from your top directory run this:

sudo IMAGE=console MACHINE=nanopi-neo3 ./flash_sd.sh /dev/sdX

Or if you use the default values (IMAGE=console and MACHINE=nanopi-neo3) then:

sudo ./flash_sd.sh /dev/sdX

If you want to do the steps manually then:

sudo umount /dev/sdX*
sudo bmaptool copy <.wic.bz2_image_path> /dev/sdX

Of course you need to change /dev/sdX with you actuall SD card dev path.

Note: In reality the produced images for the nanopi-neo3 and nanopi-r2s are the same and they are interchangable.

Why bmap-tools and wic images?

Well, wic images are a no-brainer. You can create a 50GB image, but this image probably won't be that large really. Most of the times, the real data bytes in the image will be from a few hundreds MB, to maybe 1-2 GB. The rest will be empty space. Therefore, if you build a binary image then this image will be filled with zeros. You will also have to use dd to flash the image to the SD card. That means that for a few MBs of real data, you'll wait maybe more than an hour to be written in the SD. Wic creates a map of the data and creates an image with the real binary data and a bmap file that has the map data. Then, bmaptool will use this bmap file and create the partitions and only write the real binary data. This will take a few seconds or minutes, even for images that are a lot of GBs.

For example the default image size for this repo is 13.8GB but the real data are ~62MB. Therefore, with a random SD card I have here the flashing takes ~14 secs and you get a 14GB image.

Using Docker to build the image

For consistency reasons and also to keep your main OS clean of the bloat that Yocto needs, you can use docker to build this repo. I've provided a Dockerfile which you can use to build the image and I'm also listing some tips how to use it properly, in case you have several different docker containers that need to share the download or sstate-cache folder.

Important: To build the docker image don't copy the Dockerfile from meta-nanopi-rockchip64/Dockerfile to the parent folder (where sources folder is). Always build the image inside meta-nanopi-rockchip64/Docker/, because this will save you from sending the build context.

To build the docker image run this command:

docker build --build-arg userid=$(id -u) --build-arg groupid=$(id -g) -t yocto-builder-image .

This will create a new image named yocto-builder-image and you can run this to verify that it exists.

docker images

Which returns:

REPOSITORY              TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED             SIZE
yocto-builder-image     latest              4e89467d537a        3 minutes ago       917MB

Now you can create a container and run (=attach) to it. You need to run this command in the parent folder where you can see the sources folder that contains all the meta-layers.

docker run -it --name yocto-builder -v $(pwd):/docker -w /docker yocto-builder-image bash

Then you can follow the standard procedure to build images. In case that you exit the container, then you can just run it again and attach to it like this:

docker start yocto-builder
docker attach yocto-builder

Sharing download folder between several different builds

In case that you have several different yocto builds, it doens't make sense to have a download folder for each build, because this means that you need much more space and most of the files will be duplicated. To avoid this you can create a download folder somewhere in your hard drive which can be shared from all builds. If you don't use docker, then you just need to create this folder and then create symlinks to every yocto build.

The problem with docker though, is that those symlinks don't work. Therefore, you need to virtually mount the external folder to the docker container. To do that, you need to create the container the first time with the correct options.

Let's assume that your shared download folder is this /opt/yocto-downloads.

First on the normal OS run this command:

ln -s /opt/yocto-downloads downloads

This is will create a symlink to the shared downloads folder. Then to mount this folder to the docker container you need to run:

docker run -it --name yocto-builder -v $(pwd):/docker -v /opt/yocto-downloads:/docker/downloads -w /docker allwinner-yocto-image bash

Then you can build the yocto image inside the container as usual, e.g.:

yoctouser@dcca27f70336:/docker$ MACHINE=nanopi-neo3 source ./setup-environment.sh build
yoctouser@dcca27f70336:/docker$ bitbake rk-console-image

Maintainer

Dimitris Tassopoulos dimtass@gmail.com