Posts by tony013

Hi,

This is my first release of a driver for penta-sata-tower, that uses rockpi4 from radxa. This driver was developed for LE.

It was a hard way for me, as I was not able to port the dependencies of the original driver ...

So I had to write everything from scratch - and I never wrote a single line using python language before.

anyway - for those who are interested: driver is available from github. See READ.ME beside package.mk

The driver offers temperature based fan control using cpu and hdd temperature (customizable by config file). Furthermore it supports handling of button from top-panel. Three button states are recognized/supported: clicked, double clicked and long pressed.

Each state can be bound to a system executable or a python function. This is customizable by config file too.

Have fun

Quote from CvH

from my perspective this should be a addon, ...

... if you need help just ask

I looked at the provides link, but I don't understand anything!

It was hard to figure out to provide a "simple" package, but it is completely impossible to figure out how to create an addon. At least for me.

I read packages/readme and skimmed package and addon templates and looked at some addon packages ...

I only have some plain textfiles, which I'd like to copy to certain location of the fs-image. Mostly to /usr/bin or /usr/lib but I'd like to put some files in .config directory too.

It looks like addons are created completely different from standard packages.

I guess I need some background info about the complete picture.

Yes, LE's build system is the hardest to figure out. Especially for newcomers almost impossible. We have to accept it as a black box - because it just works. The only way to learn more about it is to look at how each package is configured (package.mk).

grep -R and find are the tools that help the fastest.

The log files are all there.

There is a subdirectory build.* with the name of your target platform. There you will find all intermediate files.

The logs are located in a subdirectory .threads/logs - so they are invisible during a normal search.

Good luck!

Quote from knaerzche

That actually the RK3399 board I'm developing with - I never had any sound issues nor emmc issues (I'm using an emmc module for booting LE there, too)

That sounds phantastic!

Well, I bought the rockpi because I wanted a penta-sata-tower ...

... but when you use the tower, you notice the extremely questionable design -

The sdcard slot is hidden by the internal sata connector and that connector is so bad built, that it breaks if you connect/disconnect the cable more than 5 times or so.

With the tower you can't change sdcard, nor emmc and changing usb drive seems not to work either. Therefor I'm searching for multiboot - everything common with a standalone pi does not work with that tower.

On the other side: it works just nice and without any noise - really love it.

... and after fan control I work on supporting top panels button.

Quote from knaerzche

... Rockchip project will (finally) switch to mainline u-boot where we can use device tree overlays (they'll make it possible to inject stuff to device trees)

That sounds very promising!

Thank you!

Quote from knaerzche

As I've said before: all this is just guesswork, since I'm not having a rock pi4 board yet - none of them is a problem for rockpro64 board.

How did you apply the dtb-changes to LE image creation?

I'm looking for a way to enable pwm modules during LE build, so that I don't have to manually exchange dtb file.

Could you tell a bit about your experience with rockpro64?

Is it better supported than rockpi4?

From what I found, it is a different manufacturer, but as far as I could differentiate it, rockpi4 (with sata-hat) fits better my needs.

I just tested nightly (20210511) - but only with sdcard. Have to wait until next emmc will arrive.

I decompiled the dtb and found the max-frequency change. It is quite different from radxa stuff, but anyway - seems to work.

Clock-summary now shows 297000000

So I added my changes to that dtb and both changes work so far.

Nice work! Thank you

Quote from knaerzche

Armbian has a lot of patches, I didn't check them. For emmc I just did what the vendor does arm64: dts: set emmc max frequency to 150000000 for ROCK Pi 4 · radxa/kernel@db9dfc2 · GitHub.

Thank you for that link!

Quote from knaerzche

check again - there is one

I did - and comparing it with the link from radxa, neither my dtb from LE nightly nor your dtb from posting #13 does contain a section with "&sdhci" - and for so no property "max-frequency".

Could it be, that the kernel module for sdhci isn't enabled yet?

Quote from knaerzche

Nope. no paths have to be changed - but Rock pi4 needs special handling of emmc.

I did some tests with armbian.

Release 21.02.3 with kernel 5.10.21 boots right from emmc without special treatment.

Writing image with usb-emmc adapter is sufficient.

But no other linux-image I tried is able to boot from emmc.

armbian offers a dialog helper tool, which could enable kernel 4.4 to boot from emmc. But apparently, that helper tool changes boot code of rockpi board. I prepared a emmc with one rockpi and after mounting the emmc to another board, it did not boot.

Quote from knaerzche

Please take a spare SD card, flash the latest nightly (no update) on it and replace the device tree with the with this one: https://mega.nz/file/vHZ21D5R#…dUVYUJezmP6fPfo , where I increased that clock:

Could you please tell me, which value you changed to increase the clock?

I decompiled your file and did a diff to mine - but I only found lot of additional/changed phandles, my changes and the symbol list at the end (in my file).

As I changed dtb too, I'd like to do the changes manually.

knaerzche Thank you for the link!

So if that's the case, please let me know.

I'm willing to fix the package then.

offbeat I know this doing. But I don't know enuf from kernel stuff to do any changes there.

I already scratched the sources, but I don't know, what and where to change.

It would be easy, if I could do some scripting after dts has been generated ...

Quote from CvH

it is easier to update and you can add autostart etc there too

Hm, the only subject of change is the python version.

Is the python version available to scripts in package.mk?

Then I could change the python3.8 directory and remove version number from name.

Copy could use a variable python version.

... but - interested uses have to change dtb file anyway, so I can't offer a pnp-package.

offbeat I started following an armbian thread.

That overlay worked with kernel4.4 and kernel5.10 - so I thought, it might be usable for LE.

But bringing that overlay to LE, LE does not boot any more.

... and shellscript fails, as LE uses busybox as shell, whereas armbian has a real shell.

So I had to test, what works with LE.

My preferred way would have been to add a patch - but I don't know, how to do it.

Quote from CvH

could you share the needed changes (github?) ?

I finally worked out fan-control for LE. No additional packages needed. Just some plain text files.

You find it at Github.

Please pay attention to the READ.ME file.

I don't know how to patch the kernel to get desired result, so I wrote a recipe how any nodeveloper could activate and use fan-control.

It works until next update.

Then you have to follow the READ.ME again.

I have it active on my rockpi-tower running LE nightly and I'm very happy with it.

Actually the build from master fails again.

This time u-boot fails. I attached the build log

Line 153 of the log looks as if the build uses an include file from host and not from build system.

I guess, that should not happen.

So do I miss to install some dependencies?

Quote from chewitt

You can use overlays, but these are compiled files so you cannot add a text file and use it

Oh man! I wrote about recompiling - so yes, I know!

I read about changing extlinux.conf in other threads about overlays.

I don't know much, but I read a lot and try to follow others.

What I don't understand, is what breaks LE boot process?

I'll dive into kernel stuff to see, whether I could do some patches.

Quote from jernej

you didn't tell which board you're using.

Sorry, I'm working on a rockpi4 (rk3399 from radxa with penta-sata hat).

Quote from jernej

This should work for Allwinner boards, if you use latest image.

So overlay don't work for all boards?

I thought it's a common practice.

Quote from jernej

If you want to go this way, you have to make kernel patch and add it to "patches" folder.

Hm, I didn't find another way to work.

I first took the dtb file from running LE installation, decompiled it, changed the values and took the recompiled file back to flash image. That worked fine, but I thought, that's no way for image creation. So I searched for a way, that could work for all ...

If you know another way, how I could reach same result with the tools, LE already provides, please let me know.