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U-Boot.md

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U-Boot

Here we describe how to use U-Boot to boot NixOS on RK3588/RK3588s based SBCs.

1. Flash U-Boot to SPI NOR flash

You should get the uboot from the vendor and flash it to the SPI NOR flash before doing anything NixOS

  1. Armbian on Orange Pi 5 / Orange Pi 5 Plus as an example:
    1. download the image and flash it to a sd card first
    2. boot the board with the sd card, and then run sudo armbian-install to flash the uboot to the SPI NOR flash(maybe named as MTD devices)

For Rock 5A, we've bundled the uboot into the sdImage, so you can skip this step directly.

2. Flash NixOS

There're two ways to flash NixOS to the board:

  1. Flash NixOS to SD card
  2. Flash NixOS into SSD/eMMC

2.1. Flash NixOS to SD card

This is the common way to flash NixOS to the board.

Build an sdImage by nix build, and then flash it to a SD card using dd(please replace /dev/sdX with the correct device name of your sd card):

Instead of build from source, you can also download the prebuilt image from Releases. To understand how this flakes works, please read Cross-platform Compilation.

# ==================================
# For Orange PI 5 Plus
# ==================================
# 1. Build using the qemu-emulated aarch64 environment or on Orange Pi 5 Plus itself.
# In this way, we can take advantage of the official build cache on NixOS to greatly speed up the build
# it takes about 40 minutes to build the image(mainly the kernel) on my Orange Pi 5 Plus.
nix build github:ryan4yin/nixos-rk3588/2024092600#sdImage-opi5plus
# 2. Build using the cross-compilation environment
# NOTE: This will take a long time to build, as the official build cache is not available for the cross-compilation environment,
# you have to build everything from scratch.
nix build github:ryan4yin/nixos-rk3588/2024092600#sdImage-opi5plus-cross

zstdcat result/sd-image/orangepi5plus-sd-image-*.img.zst | sudo dd status=progress bs=8M of=/dev/sdX

# ==================================
# For Orange PI 5
# ==================================
nix build github:ryan4yin/nixos-rk3588/2024092600#sdImage-opi5
# nix build .#sdImage-opi5-cross  # fully cross-compiled
zstdcat result/sd-image/orangepi5-sd-image-*.img.zst | sudo dd status=progress bs=8M of=/dev/sdX

For Rock 5A, it requires a little more work to flash the image to the sd card:

The prebuilt image has been repaired before uploading, so you can use it directly.

nix build .#sdImage-rock5a
zstd -d result/sd-image/rock5a-sd-image-*.img.zst -o rock5a.img

# increase img's file size
dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=16 >> rock5a.img
sudo losetup --find --partscan rock5a.img

nix shell nixpkgs#parted
## rock 5a's u-boot require to use gpt partition table, and the root partition must be the first partition!
## so we need to remove all the partitions on the sd card first
## and then recreate the root partition with the same start sector as the original partition 2
START=$(sudo fdisk -l /dev/loop0 | grep /dev/loop0p2 | awk '{print $2}')
sudo parted /dev/loop0 rm 1
sudo parted /dev/loop0 rm 2
sudo parted /dev/loop0 mkpart primary ext4 ${START}s 100%

# check rootfs's status, it's broken.
sudo fsck /dev/loop0p1

# umount the image file
sudo losetup -d /dev/loop0


# flash the image to the sd card
cat rock5a.img | sudo dd status=progress bs=8M of=/dev/sdX
  1. Insert the sd card to the board, and power on
  2. Resize the root partition to the full size of the sd card.
  3. Then having fun with NixOS <3.

Once the system is booted, you can use nixos-rebuild to update the system.

Flash NixOS into SSD/eMMC

To flash the image into the board's eMMC / SSD, you need to flash the image into the SD card and start into NixOS first, as SSD / eMMC is not easy to remove and connect to your host.

Then, use the following command to flash the image into the board's SSD / eMMC:

# upload the sdImage to the NixOS system on the board
scp result/sd-image/orangepi5-sd-image-*.img.zst  rk@<ip-of-your-board>:~/

# login to the board via ssh or serial port
ssh rk@<ip-of-your-board>

# check all the block devices
# you should see nvme0n1(SSD)
$ lsblk
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
mtdblock0    31:0    0    16M  0 disk
zram0       254:0    0     0B  0 disk
nvme0n1     259:0    0 238.5G  0 disk
......

# flash the image into the board's SSD
zstdcat orangepi5-sd-image-*.img.zst | sudo dd bs=4M status=progress of=/dev/nvme0n1

After the flash is complete, remove the SD card and reboot, and NixOS should boot from the SSD / eMMC now.