Rockchip Rk3399

It looks the the next generation of ARM boards are starting to appear.
One possible target for RISC OS are boards based on the Rockchip RK3399 SOC.
The most significant thing about this is it has two Cortex-A72 CPUs at up to 2.0GHz.
Much more suitable for desktop class RISC OS hardware. The fastest available RISC OS hardware
are still lacking in certain areas. Particularly disk and network speed.

One example of a board using this SOC is the Firefly-Rk3399.
I think it’s due to be released in March 2017. The prices look quite reasonable too.
It was successfully funded on Kickstarter.

There is no detailed documentation as yet. Just place holders. The previously released
Firefly-RK3288 should give an idea of how much documentation will be released.

The recently announced Samsung Chromebook Plus also uses the same SOC.

A Cortex-A72 offer would be quite pertinent to “raise the bar”. And if there is both laptop and desktop available…

The recently announced Samsung Chromebook Plus also uses the same SOC.

If that is hackable¹ to be able run a different OS then it’s rather interesting. Handy new laptop with touchscreen.

Edit: Should have said that of course to be properly useful it needs a proper keyboard rather than the US version.

¹ Traditionally the Chromebooks are built to be hard to modify.

While sexy new hardware is a good thing, remember – what it all comes down to is if there is sufficient available documentation to allow for a port to be possible. We cannot make use of manufacturer-issued Linux binary blobs, so the level of documentation is of paramount importance.

While sexy new hardware is a good thing, remember – what it all comes down to is if there is sufficient available documentation to allow for a port to be possible.

Hence the bit where Chris referenced the documentation that did appear for the Firefly-RK3288 to give an indication how much might be available.

six-core 64-bit “server class” processor Rockchip RK3399

Bit depressing to think that RISC OS would utilise roughly 16% of the available processing power…
Edit: on second thoughts make that 16% x 32/64 :-(

Edit: on second thoughts make that 16% x 32/64 :-(

In some respects the equation for RO is 16% x 64/32 (vs. ANotherOS = 64/32) because little or nothing in the application set actually needs to shift 64 bits at once.
Assuredly some applications do need to move data in bigger chunks.

…looks good, but regarding porting…aren’t we limited to either R-PI GPU’s or OMAP GPU’s !?

…looks good, but regarding porting…aren’t we limited to either R-PI GPU’s or OMAP GPU’s !?

The iMx6 is not an R-Pi or an OMAP, and it runs RISC OS fine.

Like Rick says, it all comes down to how much documentation is available.

A quick look at the RK3288 docs suggests that they’re of reasonable quality, but there’s minimal documentation for the HDMI interface. If the RK3399 docs are similar then that could be a major problem.

Totally forgot about that one…shame on me…regarding the RK3288, there’s a similar design like the RPI available by Asus, see here As it uses a Cortex-A17 it’s an interesting cheap replacement to the existing Risc OS Cortex-A15 boards…but as you said…depends all on the docs and manpower if it will ever happen…

Dear sirs !
It really makes sense to port to RK3288 because this SOC is used in so many devices(media boxes) and also the new ASUS tinkerboard. The RK3288 SOC already has mainline kernel support and full 4k video playback support in Debian GNU/Linux via zero-copy drivers is on the way.
I would say guys “Use the toolbox” which you can find on my blog bitkistl and have fun with it.
Here you can find a demo video wich shows Debian 8, Kodi 16.1, smplayer and a WebGL demo running at the same time on a small RK3288 board called MiQi from mqmaker.
https://youtu.be/DnHJckoxGJU
If the link should not work search for bitkistl on Youtube
Best Regards,
Peter

The RK3288 SOC already has mainline kernel support and full 4k video playback support in Debian GNU/Linux via zero-copy drivers is on the way.

A reminder: RISC OS is not Linux, it not a close cousin of Linux.
It is not a GPL compliant OS.
The availability of any Linux driver with GPL source is of zero use, or so close it is of no great difference.

If someone mentioned a NetBSD build and driver set with source that might be useful.

As Steve says, GPL source is no use to us, the licence is too restrictive and haphazard to be any good.

Note also that your exact words are “via zero-copy drivers”. This, you will find, is a binary blob that sits in the zero-copy part of Linux (if I remember correctly, that’s drivers in user space or somesuch?). It will not be source, because the internal secrets of every GPU are locked up tighter than a nun’s you-know-what. As RISC OS is not even slightly related to Linux, such a binary blob will be about as useful as a random Windows exe…in other words, it won’t. Be useful, that is.

As has been mentioned before, there is a lot more required to porting an operating system to a new device than said device simply existing. A lot of detailed low level documentation is required. Take a gander at the OMAP3 technical data for the SoC used in the Beagle family. If I remember, it runs to something like three thousand pages, and even that doesn’t give coverage to the GPU other than in basic framebuffer mode…
That should give you an idea of what is necessary to think about porting. The next part, of course, is understanding all of that gibberish and knowing how to apply it. And the final part, knowing how to work out what went wrong when it blows up, as it invariably will. How does one debug stuff like a failure to switch on the MMU correctly when there is no operating system whatsoever (as we haven’t gotten far enough into system init to get anything much going)?
When those questions have answers, then one is able to think about porting RISC OS to a new platform.

The tl;dr version: if porting was easy, we’d have builds for everything. ;-)

A Linux binary blob might be useful to us if (a) we know how to drive it, (b) it requires an environment that RISC OS can provide, © its licence conditions are compatible with RISC OS.

Can anyone answer those three?

It looks like a good candidate, not withstanding Dave’s questions. However, I wonder if an older A15 or A53 Chrome-book might be an easier target, considering RISC OS currently runs on those chips.

An idea that I first saw some ARM or 96boards engineers consider was to retrofit an old Compaq laptop with a fast ARM chip. With this in mind, I wonder with the release of the pi compute 3 module if this was a feasible alternative to getting RISC OS on a standard laptop?

Too much negative energy! I doubt that riscos cannot be ported to this soc.

I had a surprise when looking at the Firefly site. There are two volumes of the Rockchip TRM for the RK3399. Volume 1 is 1045 pages, volume 2 is 1014 pages.

Whether that’s enough to port RISC OS from is another matter.

I read somewhere in the docs of 3288.. The IEP can talk directly to display , just like the IPUs on another platform. Throw in a RGB pixelbuffer and off you go.
About HDMI. The documentation states that HDMI is configured from power on (1080p) and just needs a reset. So the combination of those two things might give
a easy way of getting graphics from start, even if it probably takes some more steps..

The path is IEP→VOP→HDMI.

I am optimistic and will look into it in the upcoming weeks.

I don’t know but I think the availability of IEP, IPU and such enables hardware doublebuffering, at least I have used that way in other projects.

The firefly RK3399 is on promotion at the moment and I see that there’s an add-on board to get two SATA ports, coupled with that, it does have an A53 on-board which RISC OS might run on. I guess the potential is there for it be ported to the chromebook, perhaps this might just be the best way to get RISC OS on a laptop and a powerful graphics engine.

Another potential candidate might be the recently released HiKey 960 from 96Boards. The specs are similarly mouth watering.

The HiKey 960 development platform is based around the Huawei Kirin 960 octa-core ARM® big.LITTLE™ processor with four ARM Cortex®-A73 and four Cortex-A53 cores with 3GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM memory, 32GB of UFS 2.0 flash storage, and the latest generation Mali™ G71 MP8 graphics processor. The board is provided by Archermind and LeMaker through multiple channels