NixOS build for Orangepi 5B

Overview

Build the installer image which is ready to flash to SDCard to boot. The final image contains also the u-boot-rockchip.bin flashed.

To build the image, try nix build, to flash to sdcard, try nix run . -- /dev/mmcblk1

Spec

• Kernel 5.10.160 from Armbian
• U-boot - mainline 2023-07-02 with patch
• Panfork (for mesa 3D) v20.0.0 + mali firmware

Check flake.nix for more detail.

Flash the image

zstdcat result/sd-image/nixos-sd-image-*.img.zstd | sudo dd of=/dev/mmcblkX bs=4M status=progress

Status

Working

• Onchip IPs seem to work
• Ethernet
• GPU - on wayland (the swaywm included within sdcard image)
  • Start sway will then load Mali firmware, to check GPU accelleration, run firefox with Wayland enable MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 firefox
    • about:support will show the status of GPU supporting
  • Perf is quite good - video playback consumed ~30% CPU (1080p youtube video on 4K monitor), ~50% CPU (4K youtube video on 4K monitor) - fullscreen mode
• USB-C OTG-mode
• Other? - not fully check (not that intrrested in :D)
• Audio

Not working

• Wifi/BT
• Other??

Ref.

• Work from Ryan Yin

Note:

• Image is able to build from my OPI-5B, might work on x86_64 machine (with binfmt supported).