The crust is the lowest-level component of a delicious fruit pie. Similary,
Crust is the lowest-level firmware component that runs on $FRUIT (Banana,
Orange, Lichee) Pi single-board computers and other Allwinner-based devices,
such as the Pine64 Pinebook and PinePhone.
Crust improves battery life and thermal performance by implementing a deep sleep state. During deep sleep, the CPU cores, the DRAM controller, and most onboard peripherals are powered down, reducing power consumption by 80% or more compared to an idle device. On boards without a PMIC, Crust is also responsible for orderly power-off and power-on of the device.
For this to work, Crust runs outside the main CPU and DRAM, on a dedicated always-on microprocessor called a System Control Processor (SCP). Crust is designed to run on a specific SCP implementation, Allwinner's AR100.
See Crust's ABI documentation for a detailed description of how Crust interacts with other firmware components at runtime.
Interested users and contributors are encouraged to join #crust on freenode
to discuss the firmware and related power management topics.
Crust supports any board with a SoC listed in the table below. There is no
board-specific code needed for basic functionality. Boards that are tested and
known to work have a defconfig file in the repository. For everything else,
use the defconfig for a similar board, or run make config or make nconfig
to choose the appropriate options (there aren't many).
| SoC | Support level | SCPI | CPU cores | CPU subsystem | DRAM | PMIC |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A64 | Production/stable | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| A83T | Known to compile | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| H5 | Production/stable | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | N/A |
| H6 | Known to run | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes |
Support for the H3 SoC is planned, but it has not yet been implemented. Patches providing support for H3 or older chips are welcome, as are patches providing defconfigs for tested boards.
Crust supports mainline Linux only. It completely replaces Allwinner's bespoke, proprietary firmware with a libre solution that supports standard protocols and is developed entirely in the open with community input. Effort is underway to upstream all changes to third-party projects; however, some patches are currently still needed.
- ARM Trusted Firmware: upstream support for Crust was merged in commit
c335ad480d41, and is present in all releases starting with v2.3. Optional patches for improved support are available in thecrustbranch of the crust-firmware fork. - Linux: while Linux does not directly communicate with Crust, it requires some
small patches to cleanly share the clock controller and PMIC bus controller
hardware with Crust. They are available in the
crust-minimalbranch of the crust-firmware fork. Those patches, plus additional changes for reduced power consumption (helpful even if you are not using Crust), are available in thecrustbranch. - U-Boot: some small patches are needed for U-Boot to load Crust to the right
place in SRAM at boot. There are in the
crustbranch of the crust-firmware fork. While these patches are recommended, it is possible to avoid them by padding your ATF binary to 48KiB (64KiB for H6) and then concatenating Crust onto the end.
An easy way to get all the pieces in the right places, with the right patches,
is to use the Makefile in the crust-firmware meta repository.
See the README file there for further instructions. Alternatively, you can
build each firmware component individually. See the README.sunxi64
file in the U-Boot source tree for more details. Installation of the combined
U-Boot+ATF+Crust binary works the same as for U-Boot without Crust.
Building Crust requires a cross-compiler targeting the or1k architecture
(OpenRISC 1000, not RISC-V), which is officially supported in upstream GCC
starting with GCC 9.1.0. Prebuilt toolchains are available from musl.cc,
bootlin, and possibly your Linux distribution's package archive.
If your cross toolchain has a different tuple (the toolchain's libc is not
relevant when compiling freestanding firmware programs), or if it is not in
your PATH, export CROSS_COMPILE or edit the top of the Makefile to
provide the appropriate prefix or full path.
Run make to build the firmware and related tools, or make scp to build just
the firmware, which will be placed at build/scp/scp.bin. Adding V=1 to the
command line will run a verbose build, showing you the commands as they run.
Set SRC, OBJ, or TGT as necessary if you want to do an out-of-tree build.
The success of the crust firmware project is made possible by community support. For more information regarding community contributions, please reference the crust firmware contribution guidelines.