Rock5B AKA Rock Pi 5B

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arborsexual · Post by **arborsexual** » Sun Feb 12, 2023 2:03 am

Been sitting on my 16GB model Rock5B for months waiting for stuff like the wifi module, emmc, and such to come in. All got here today. Right now I am using dd to put the Radxa Android 12 image on the emmc to test out things, but ultimately I'd like to get gentoo going on this board. I am wondering where exactly to start though.

I know mainline linux support for this chip is not 100% yet, but there are other linux distros that have images for it, so there must be a way get gentoo going.

Any ideas?

Suggested reading?

flysideways · Post by **flysideways** » Sun Feb 12, 2023 7:25 am

Their website has downloads for both Dedian and Ubuntu. Maybe, follow their instructions to get up and running with either one and look around in their working system to get an idea of what parts are needed for a working Linux system.

JumboAg · Post by **JumboAg** » Sun Feb 12, 2023 3:28 pm

I own a couple of different SOCs and the basic process is the same for each:

Assuming you can boot off at least two things (eMMC, micro SD card, USB stick)
use their stock ubuntu/debian image to get an OS on one drive , then do a hybrid stage3 install using the gentoo handbook for the rootfs on another.

Where you run into challenges is with the bootloader. It varies wildly from chip to chip. Most are some variant of u-boot.

I would recommend you first use their stock kernel, firmware, modules and DTB to get your gentoo rootfs running to prove a baseline install. From there, you can start getting creating trying a mainline kernel or gentoo-sources.

I currently have an allwinner orange pi fully booted using their kernel source but I did do my own compile after changing a few options. My amlogic and roc boards I'm still fighting various things.

Post by **NeddySeagoon** » Sun Feb 12, 2023 4:07 pm

arborsexual,

Provided you can boot from a removable device, you can make a hybird boot media with no access to an arm/arm64 chroot at all.

Partition the boot device
untar the Gentoo stage3 to its root
Unpick another system for its kernel, initrd and /lib/modules. Put them in place on the boot media.

Set the root password by copying the root line from a working /etc/shadow
Create symlinks in /etc/runlevels/* for the services you want to start.
Edit /etc/conf.d/* in the target root.

Its all standard handbook stuff without the aid of a chroot.

The only thing you can't do like this ... at least, I don't know how ... is to install grub and make a grub.cfg

It is possible to chroot if you really must, with the aid of qemu-static.
emerge works like that too.

n1ese · Post by **n1ese** » Sun Apr 09, 2023 2:13 pm

Looking at thing gentlemans blog post from a few months ago, it looks very possible but there are some hacks to the bootloader involved.

https://www.famera.cz/blog/computers/ge ... ock5b.html

I'm thinking of ordering a Rock 5B as a replacement for my Raspberry Pi4 as I need some better CPU performance and more memory. I hope your experiences are going well.

Stilzchen · Post by **Stilzchen** » Sat Jun 10, 2023 9:41 am

I got my Rock5B some month ago, flashed Armbian, DietPi and Radxas own Rock5B Debian to some SD cards and tested around a while.
After I found and installed a working NVME SSD I followed the famera article and the SPI flash instructions to install Gentoo to NVME.

Works great for me.

ShorTie · Post by **ShorTie** » Thu Jun 15, 2023 8:33 pm

I too have flashed the nvme boot flash.
Now I can not boot from sdcard ..

~
Any idea's ??

Stilzchen · Post by **Stilzchen** » Sat Jun 24, 2023 8:57 am

I had that too.
I don't need that switch between sdcard and NVME but I agree that there should be an easy method for dual booting.

My working solution:
Delete the SPI with the zero.img

Code: Select all

dd if=zero.img of=/dev/mtdblock0

and than system boots from sdcard again.
If you want to boot from NVME than flash SPI again.

Maybe another solution would be a boot partition at sdcard with a root partition at NVME. Than you always boot from sdcard and can change the running system easily by changing sdcards.