ArchLinux ARM for Amlogic s9xxx devices

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This is not an official release of ArchLinuxARM, but only a pre-built flash-and-boot image of it for Amlogic platform for generic s9xxx boxes due to some kernel quirks needed to make it bootable on these devices not merged in mainline kernel

Information

Please only use the image provided in this project as live environment to install another ArchLinuxARM with pacstrap, not as your daily driver. A pre-defined ArchLinux is never an ArchLinux experience intended. I've made some decisions on configuration and packages to make the image bootable, these are probably not what you really want for your system. Refer to the installation guide on my blog for how to install in Arch way.

Installation

Drive

Installing on USB drive is more recommended, and then alarm-install can be referred to to install to eMMC or to another USB drive/SD card in the ArchLinux way

Releases & Images

All Amlogic s9xxx devices share the same generic image, i.e. there is no default u-boot.ext and dtb set, and you must set them according to your device. And take care dtb should be set both in uEnv.txt and extlinux/extlinux.conf

Three different kinds of releases are available

ArchLinuxARM-aarch64-Amlogic-*.img.xz is just like the normal image you would find in the Armbian and Openwrt projects, where you should just decompress and burn it to a SD card / USB drive. The layout is hard-coded but it's therefore easy to use because you do not need to worry about partitioning
ArchLinuxARM-aarch64-Amlogic-*-root.tar.xz is a compressed archive of the rootfs, it can be decompressed to an already partitioned disk so you can freely decide the partition layout and size, but you need to update /etc/fstab, /boot/uEnv.txt, /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf according to your actual partitions. Use the following command to extract the archive:
```
bsdtar -C /your/root --acls --xattrs -xvpf /the/archive.tar.xz
```
ArchLinuxARM-aarch64-Amlogic-*-pkgs.tar.xz is a compressed archive of the AUR packages built and installed into the above image. You can download it and upgrade your packages with the files in it with pacman -U, if you don't want to built them by yourself when upgrading. It could also be used to pacstrap an installation by yourself.

Bootup setup

After you flash the image, you should open the FAT32 first/boot partition with label ALARMBOOT, and do the following adjustment:

Find a corresponding u-boot in the folder uboot, copy/move it as u-boot.ext in the root of the partition. You can then safely delete the uboot folder if you want to save space
Edit uEnv.txt, change the line
```
FDT=/dtbs/linux-aarch64-flippy/amlogic/PLEASE_SET_YOUR_DTB.dtb
```
according to your actual device and the corresponding file under /dtbs/linux-aarch64-flippy/amlogic, e.g. for HK1Box this should be changed to:
```
FDT=/dtbs/linux-aarch64-flippy/amlogic/meson-sm1-hk1box-vontar-x3.dtb
```

Similarly, edit extlinux/extlinux.conf, change the line

FDT     /dtbs/linux-aarch64-flippy/amlogic/PLEASE_SET_YOUR_DTB.dtb

to like this

FDT     /dtbs/linux-aarch64-flippy/amlogic/meson-sm1-hk1box-vontar-x3.dtb

Booting

Holding the reset button with the SD card / USB drive plugged in, and power on the box, just like how you would do with Armbian and Openwrt.

Connection

Network

By default, systemd-networkd.service and systemd-resolved.service are enabled, and DHCP is enabled on en* and eth*, you can check your router to get the box's IP

SSH

By default, sshd.service is enabled, and root login is permitted, whose password is alarm_please_change_me

Users

By default, there's a user alarm in the group wheel and can use sudo with password. The user has a password alarm_please_change_me

Upgrade

Packages

It's recommended to do a full upgrade right after you boot:

sudo pacman -Syu

or (yay without argument calls sudo pacman -Syu implicitly)

yay

Initramfs

And generate the initramfs, since only the u-boot legacy initrd fallback image is kept to save space, all other 3 initramfs were deleted before packing (standard default, standard fallback and legacy default):

mkinitcpio -P

Depending on your booting configuration you can choose whether to keep the u-boot legacy initrd or not: https://7ji.github.io/embedded/2022/11/11/amlogic-booting.html.

If you use standard initramfs, you can save space for two initramfs. You'll need to use /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf as the configuration.
- /boot/boot.scr and /boot/uEnv.txt could be deleted
- The following line in /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf needs to be updated:
```
INITRD  /initramfs-linux-aarch64-flippy-fallback.uimg
```
  to
```
INITRD  /initramfs-linux-aarch64-flippy.img
```
  And the hooks for u-boot legacy initrd can be moved
```
pacman -R uboot-legacy-initrd-hooks
```
If you want to keep using the u-boot initrd, you need to take care of the extra space occupied by the legacy u-boot initrd
- The hooks provided by my AUR package uboot-legacy-initrd-hooks will automatically convert initramfs to u-boot legacy initrd, which comes pre-installed by default
- For cases where you update the initramfs by yourself without the hooks (e.g. manually running mkinitcpio -P), remember to invoke the script to also update the legacy initrd
```
img2uimg
```

Build

The script must be run on an AArch64 device natively, and on either ArchLinux ARM itself or derived distros like Manjaro ARM, as our AUR packages need to built natively, and the package manager Pacman should also be run natively to install them and other essential packages. Unless you want to leave a lot of binaries not tracked by the package manager (very dangerous, and not the Arch way), this is the way to go.

Your could just use the images here or follow my guide on my blog to bootstrap a working ArchLinux ARM installation from ground up to be used as the build environment.

Be sure to setup distcc with other more powerful machines (e.g. your x86-64 server) as voluenteers beforehand, following the documentation on ArchWiki. The AArch64 devices themselves are too weak and slow to build just by themselves.

Before the first build, make sure these build dependencies are installed:

sudo pacman -Syu arch-install-scripts \
                 base-devel \
                 dosfstools \
                 git \
                 go \
                 parted \
                 uboot-tools \
                 xz \
                 wget

When cloning the repo, remember to register all of the submodules and update them first. Otherwise the AUR packages would fail to build because of missing PKGBUILD. The option --recursive is enough for managing them during the clone.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/7Ji/amlogic-s9xxx-archlinuxarm.git

When pulling the update, you need to run git submodule update to also update the submodules

git pull
git submodule init
git submodule update

After you get your local repo ready, all it needs is a simple ./build.sh to build the image

./build.sh

Or if you prefer to prefix it with the corresponding shell (-e flash must be set):

bash -e build.sh

The script should be run as a user that can use sudo, as it will run some high risk commands with sudo instead of always running as root. It will refuse to work if being run as root or with sudo. You might need to to set the following option in sudoers if you want to keep it in background to cancel the timeout:

Defaults passwd_timeout=0

There're some environment variables you could set to define the behaviours:

compressor
- A combination of compressor executable and optional argument (e.g. gzip for compressing with gzip with default options, xz -9e for compressing with xz with maximum compression)
- If set to no, then the archive and image won't be compressed.

Sources

U-boot unpacked to /boot/uboot are downloaded during building from ophub's Armbian repo

Scripts and configuration under /boot are also adapted from ophub's Armbian repo but directly maintained here

Packages ampart-git, linux-aarch64-flippy-bin, linux-firmware-amlogic-ophub and uboot-legacy-initrd-hooks are AUR packages maintained by myself.

Package yay is from an AUR package maintained by its author

feiser2016 / amlogic-s9xxx-archlinuxarm