The Radxa Orion O6 in PC casing
The Radxa Orion O6 is am Aarch64 board using the CIX CD8180 SoC.
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 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. - 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.