Hardkernel ODROID-M1S

Resources

This article is a supplementary guide for the nuances of installing Gentoo on the M1S system. This guide assumes the user can boot the system via a drive that is not the installation destination(SD card or onboard MMC). It will begin with assuming the user has done nothing to the XU4 and assuming that the M1S has internet access to it. The guide will walk through steps that are outside the standard Gentoo handbook, and will refer back to the handbook for standard installation sections. This guide will cover, getting a boot-able image usable for installation, minor U-boot configuration, and lastly kernel requirements to make a boot-able system. This guide is based off the ODROID-XU4 and ODROID-N2 Wiki articles.

Note
This guide does not cover any of the GPIO interface equipment

Prerequisites

Computer running linux or unix based OS
Access to read/write to an SD-Card from this computer

Booting installation media

Getting an image

The official documentation is here and it points to images the user can download. Odroid M1S OS images Although this link uses an older image, for the purpose of this document the new version of Ubuntu 22 for the m1s was used. Available from here Ubuntu M1S images At the time of this writing this is the image that was used.

user $wget http://ppa.linuxfactory.or.kr/images/raw/arm64/jammy/ubuntu-22.04-server-odroidm1s-20231114.img.xz

Micro SD-Card preparation Option 1

The boot process of the M1s is described in the ODROID-M1S wiki First the boot software loads U-Boot, which as to be a specific location, which then loads the actual kernel from the boot partition. Boot order is the SD card first then the eMMC

Note
According to postings on the Odroid forms there are options to change the version of Uboot or running a special binary which is said to allow booting the system differently for example via the NVMe drive.

OTG mmc writing

This has not been tested during the writing of this document, but according to the odroid wiki you can use OTG and their SDK to write to the eMMC drive.

Place image on SD card

Once the image file has been downloaded, write it to the SD card. Please be careful of your system and drive lettering. Many people also use something like etcher to write images for windows or other operating systems.

root #xz -dc ubuntu-22.04-server-odroidm1s-20231114.img.xz | dd of=/dev/sdY status=progress

Boot and installation

Place the SD card in the system and power the system on. A USB keyboard and HDMI compatible monitor or a Serial adapter compatible with the interface on the board will be required if access to the system is needed(EG: network is not working). SSH into the system using username odroid and password is the same.

Note
According to this guide [1] it is recommended to create two partitions for Bootloader use in the future. Although the MMC in the system comes partitioned with 2 partitions. 1 for boot and 2 for the OS.

Gentoo installation

Installation from this point the user can follow the standard handbook. Come back here when the kernel is ready to be configured.

Note
Please be mindful of x86/amd64 speicifc steps from the handbook, Generally this is going to be CFLAG optimizations etc. It is safe to skip those steps and just have a standard system

Kernel building

The user can build the kernel manually or with genkernel. Below is a list of options that will need to be enabled. At the time of this writing only the 6.1.x kernel was able to boot and operate properly. 6.6.x and 5.10 were attempted, but did not work.

Edit kernel options:

KERNEL

Platform selection --->
  [*] Rockchip Platforms
Device Drivers --->
  [*] PCI support --->
     PCI controller drivers --->
       <*> Rockchip PCIe host controller
       [*] Rockchip PCIe endpoint controller
         DesignWare PCI Core Support --->
           [*] Rockchip DesignWare PCIe controller
  <*> Memory Technology Device (MTD) suport --->
    <M> SPI NOR device support
  -*- Device Tree and Open Firmware support --->
    [*] Device Tree overlays
   NVME Support --->
    <*> NVME Exporess block device 
  [*] Network device support --->
    [*] Ethernet driver support  --->
      [*] STMicroelectronics devices
        <*> STMicroelectronics Multi-Gigabit Ethernet driver
          <*> STMMAC Platform bus support
            <*> Generic driver for DWMAC
            <*> Rockchip dwmac support
    {*} PHY Device support and infrastructure --->
       <*> Rockchip Ethernet PHYs
  Character devices  --->
    <*> Serial device bus  --->
      [*]   Serial device TTY port controller
    Serial drivers  --->
      <*> 8250/16550 and compatible serial support
      [*]   Console on 8250/16550 and compatible serial port
      [*]   DMA support for 16550 compatible UART controllers
      <*>   8250/16550 PCI device support
      <*> Support for Synopsys DesignWare 8250 quirks
      <*> Devicetree based probing for 8250 ports
      [*] Early console using ARM semihosting
  I2C support --->
    I2c Hardware Bus support --->
      <M> Rockchip RK3xxx I2C adapter
  PTP Clock support --->
    <M> PTP clock support
  Pin controllers --->
    <*> Pinctrl and GPIO driver for RK805 PMIC
    <*> Rockchip gpio and pinctrl driver
  [*] Voltage and Current Regulator Support --->
    <*>   PWM voltage regulator
    <*>   Rockchip RK805/RK808/RK809/RK817/RK818 Power regulators
  Graphics support  --->
    <*> Direct Rendering Manager (XFree86 4.1.0 and higher DRI support)
    <*> DRM Support for Rockchip
    <M> Panfrost (DRM support for ARM Mali Midgard/Bifrost GPUs)
  USB support --->
    <*>   xHCI HCD (USB 3.0) support
  <*> MMC/SD/SDIO card support  ---> 
     <*>   MMC block device drive
     <*>   Synopsys DesignWare Memory Card Interface 
     <*>     Rockchip specific extensions for Synopsys DW Memory Card Interface  
  IOMMU Hardware support --->
     [*]   Rockchip IOMMU Support
  SOC (System On Chip) specific Drivers  --->
     <*> Rockchip IO domain support
     [*] Rockchip generic power domain

Note
All of these may not be required. The user can decide if they want to do built in vs module as well.

Making initramfs

For this build Dracut is used for building the initramfs. This is done for the user when running make install in the kernel source tree. Before doing the dracut configuration needs to be modified. You will also need u-boot-tools installed.

Install packages

root #emerge --ask sys-kernel/dracut dev-embedded/u-boot-tools

Modify Dracut configuraiton

Then create the needed configuration file, this is needed to make it include the video card driver.

root #mkdir -p /etc/dracut.conf.d/

root #echo 'add_dracutmodules+=" drm "' > /etc/dracut.conf.d/odroid.conf

Edit the system dracut DRM script, the section that needs to be modified look like this. It is near the top of the file.

FILE /usr/lib/dracut/modules.d/50drm/module-setup.sh

if [[ ${DRACUT_ARCH:-$(uname -m)} == arm* || ${DRACUT_ARCH:-$(uname -m)} == aarch64 ]]; then
        # arm/aarch64 specific modules needed by drm
        instmods \
            "=drivers/gpu/drm/i2c" \
            "=drivers/gpu/drm/panel" \
            "=drivers/gpu/drm/rockchip" \
            "=drivers/gpu/drm/panfrost" \
            "=drivers/gpu/drm/bridge" \
            "=drivers/video/backlight"
    fi

The rockchip and panfrost directories were added to this list.

Kernel install and initramfs install

Lastly from the kernel source tree run the modules_install and install. This will execute dracut and place the kernel and initramfs in the /boot directory.

root #make modules_install

root #make install

The make install script also handles formatting the kernel and initramfs properly for boot with uboot. There is no need to use the mkImage script from uboot.

Note
The user will need to make sure the /boot filesystem is mounted.

Note
Uboot supports various file systems, but for this article ext4 was used.

Boot loader configuration

Note
The writer of this article is not very familiar with uboot and the ARM booting process, below is just a way that was found that made the system work correctly.

The boot file system now should just have your kernel along with the supporting files. The version of uboot currently with the M1S uses a boot.scr file to handle its configuration. We will create a boot.txt file to use as the source to build the .scr file. We will also require a DTB file from the boot medium for the system.

Kernel Device tree DTS and DTB

Note
This is a step the writer does not understand why it needs to be done. So if someone can share more information here it would be appreciated

First we will get the Device tree files. As of this writing the kernel source does not include the needed DTS file for the M1S hardware, thus we will use the one from the install medium. Create a new session into the running installation source OS(ubuntu). Go to the /boot directory and copy the dtb-6.1.0-odroid-arm64 or which ever one is available to your boot partition.

root #cp /boot/dtb-6.1.0-odroid-arm64 /mnt/gentoo/boot

Back inside the gentoo install, we will use the dtc "compiler" that comes with the kernel to "re-compile" the file.

root #/usr/src/linux/scripts/dtc/dtc -I dtb -O dts -o /boot/source.dts /boot/dtb-6.1.0-odroid-arm64

Then re-compile

root #/usr/src/linux/scripts/dtc/dtc -I dts -O dtb -o /boot/dtb-6.1.74-gentoo-arm64 /boot/source.dts

Cleanup the dtb file copied from the installation media

root #rm /boot/dtb-6.1.0-odroid-arm64

Note
Once the DTS is in the kernel source tree, instead of the above the user would run make dtbs from the kernel source tree then copy the correct DTB file for your hardware to the /boot filesystem.

Creating boot.scr

Now we create a boot.txt file

Warning
While the boot.scr looks like a normal text file there is some binary data that mkImage adds to it so do not directly edit this file

FILE /boot/boot.txt

#
# flash-kernel: bootscr.odroid-rk3566
#

# Bootscript using the new unified bootcmd handling
#
# Expects to be called with the following environment variables set:
#
#  devtype              e.g. mmc/scsi etc
#  devnum               The device number of the given type
#  bootpart             The partition containing the boot files
#                       (introduced in u-boot mainline 2016.01)
#  prefix               Prefix within the boot partiion to the boot files
#  kernel_addr_r        Address to load the kernel to
#  fdt_addr_r           Address to load the FDT to
#  ramdisk_addr_r       Address to load the initrd to.
#
# The uboot must support the booti and generic filesystem load commands.

if test -z "${variant}"; then
    setenv variant m1s
fi
setenv board odroid${variant}

setenv bootargs " ${bootargs} root=YOUR_ROOT"
setenv bootargs "${bootargs} rootwait pcie_aspm=off"
setenv overlay_resize 8192

setenv bootlabel "Gentoo"

# Default TTY console
setenv bootargs "${bootargs} console=tty1 console=ttyS2,1500000"

# MISC
#
setenv bootargs "${bootargs} pci=nomsi"
setenv bootargs "${bootargs} net.ifnames=0"

load ${devtype} ${devnum}:${partition} ${loadaddr} ${prefix}config.ini \
    &&  ini generic ${loadaddr}
if test -n "${overlay_profile}"; then
    ini overlay_${overlay_profile} ${loadaddr}
fi

if test -n "${console}"; then
  setenv bootargs "${bootargs} console=${console}"
fi

if test -n "${default_console}"; then
  setenv bootargs "${bootargs} console=${default_console}"
fi

# kernel version string to append to filenames.
if test -z "${fk_kvers}"; then
   setenv fk_kvers "6.1.74-gentoo-arm64"
fi

if test -z "${fdtfile}"; then
   setenv fdtfile "rk3566-odroid-${variant}.dtb"
fi

if test -z "${distro_bootpart}"; then
  setenv partition ${bootpart}
else
  setenv partition ${distro_bootpart}
fi



load ${devtype} ${devnum}:${partition} ${fdt_addr_r} ${prefix}dtb-${fk_kvers} \
fdt addr ${fdt_addr_r}

if test "x{overlays}" != "x"; then
    for overlay in ${overlays}; do
        fdt resize ${overlay_resize}
        load ${devtype} ${devnum}:${partition} ${loadaddr} ${prefix}dtbs/${fk_kvers}/rockchip/overlays/${board}/${over\
                && fdt apply ${loadaddr}
    done
fi

load ${devtype} ${devnum}:${partition} ${ramdisk_addr_r} ${prefix}vmlinuz-${fk_kvers} \
&& unzip ${ramdisk_addr_r} ${kernel_addr_r} \
&& load ${devtype} ${devnum}:${partition} ${ramdisk_addr_r} ${prefix}initramfs-${fk_kvers}.img \
&& echo "Booting Gentoo ${fk_kvers} from ${devtype} ${devnum}:${partition}..." \
&& booti ${kernel_addr_r} ${ramdisk_addr_r}:${filesize} ${fdt_addr_r}

load ${devtype} ${devnum}:${partition} ${kernel_addr_r} ${prefix}vmlinuz-${fk_kvers} \
&& load ${devtype} ${devnum}:${partition} ${ramdisk_addr_r} ${prefix}initramfs-${fk_kvers}.img \
&& echo "Booting Gentoo ${fk_kvers} from ${devtype} ${devnum}:${partition}..." \
&& booti ${kernel_addr_r} ${ramdisk_addr_r}:${filesize} ${fdt_addr_r}

In this file the user will need to modify their kernel arguments and kernel version string. Kernel version is set on the line that looks like this setenv fk_kvers "6.1.74-gentoo-arm64" Kernel boot line arguments are built using lines like this setenv bootargs " ${bootargs} root=YOUR_ROOT" Some lines are configured for the user like Console etc. The user is required to put the correct root string for their system.(this is the kernel cmdline)

Note
File naming standard will have to follow how this script is configured or the user will have to make their own modifications.

Once modifications have been made the file must be "compiled".

root #mkimage -A arm64 -T script -O linux -n 'boot script' -C none -d /boot/boot.txt /boot/boot.scr

This will properly format the boot.scr file for uboot.

Finalizing

From here it is back to the handbook to complete the installation.

Note
Remember to take out the SD card for the reboot into Gentoo, as it is the first boot priority

External resources