The Radxa Orion O6 in PC casing
The Radxa Orion O6 is an Aarch64 board using the CIX CD8180 SoC. This SoC has the codename "SKY1" so this is used in e.g. device tree naming.
As of kernel v6.17-rc1 there is some limited mainline kernel support for this machine, as long as you use it with ACPI.
Booting the mainline kernel with Debian
To begin with I had to get used to the on-target development model that is so common among PC users: i.e. you actually compile and boot the kernel on the same machine, no cross-compiling. Believe it or not but this is unfamiliar territory for me.
- Obtain and install the very latest firmware, also known as BIOS. As of writing what is on Radxa:s website is 0.3.0, but by inspecting this github page you find release 1.0.0.
- Since I was using Fedora I had to go through some extra trouble to
extract the actual firmware files from the Debian package:
wget https://github.com/radxa-pkg/edk2-cix/releases/download/1.0.0-1/edk2-cix_1.0.0-1_all.deb
ar x edk2-cix_1.0.0-1_all.deb
tar xvfz data.tar.xz
cp usr/share/edk2/radxa/orion-o6/* /mnt/my-fat32-formatted-drive
Then install this as described on the relevant Radxa page. - Install Radxa:s custom kernel and Debian image.
MAKE SURE YOU INSTALL THE GRUB SHIM IN THE LAST STEP
I guess you can use just EFI to boot but I have no clue how to modify the cmdline with EFI. - Install a lot of prerequisites from Debian:
apt-get install git emacs packaging-dev libdw-dev - Clone Torvalds latest HEAD kernel
- cd linux
make arch=arm64 defconfig
make menuconfig
Select CONFIG_ARM64_ACPI_PARKING_PROTOCOL (I don't know if this is necessary...) - make -j12
- make -j12 deb-pkg
- cd $HOME
- Install the newly compiled Debian kernel package, it will be something like
dpkg -i linux-image-6.17.0-rc2-00201-g3957a5720157_6.17.0~rc2-00201-g3957a5720157-4_arm64.deb
The initramfs is regenerated and everything.
When installing a new custom-compiled kernel package like this, remove all the old ones. The Debian rootfs is fine, but the GRUB boot menu will be confused. Purge it out like:
dpkg -P linux-image-6.17.0-rc2-00201-g3957a5720157 - Reboot
- Edit the command line for booting you new image in GRUB, remove the "acpi=off" statement, because we have to use ACPI.
- Boot
- Linux should come up and mount root with mainline, with a dmesg like this first boot I did.