Radxa Dragon 6A

The Radxa Dragon Q6A is a credit card-sized single-board computer built around Qualcomm’s QCS6490 — the same silicon family found in the Fairphone 5 and Qualcomm’s own RB3gen2 reference platform. It packs an octa-core Kryo 670 CPU, an Adreno 643 GPU, and a 12 TOPS Hexagon NPU into a board with Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi 6, HDMI, triple camera connectors, and an M.2 NVMe slot. Starting at around $60, it sits in an interesting spot — significantly more compute per dollar than a Raspberry Pi 5, with a genuine ML inference pipeline that doesn’t require an external accelerator. Qualcomm provides Yocto builds for RB3Gen2 boards and Radxa mentions this in their documentation but doesn’t provide any how-to. In this article, we shall explore the steps taken to get Yocto running with Mainline Linux Kernel.

Here are steps to reproduce it by yourself, if you are the happy owner of this board, currently priced at 48 EUR on the Arduino shop for the 2 GB version. This is done without removing the original kernel. Your board will still boot such kernel by default.

Setup and prerequisites

To do this by yourself, you will need:

• An Arduino Q board

• A USB-C hub with external power, to power the board and to connect external devices such as USB mass storage or USB-Ethernet.

Root Commit’s contributions to Linux 6.19

Linux 6.19 is out with 7 contributions from Root Commit:

• riscv: dts: spacemit: add Ethernet and PDMA to OrangePi RV2

• dt-bindings: riscv: spacemit: Add OrangePi R2S board

• riscv: dts: spacemit: Add OrangePi R2S board device tree

• dt-bindings: arm: rockchip: merge Asus Tinker and Tinker S

• dt-bindings: arm: rockchip: Add Asus Tinker Board 3/3S

• arm64: dts: rockchip: Add Asus Tinker Board 3 and 3S device tree

Introduction

Orange PI 3B is a cheap and attractive Raspberry Pi sized single board computer based on the Rockchip RK3566:

• Rockchip RK3566 (4x ARM Cortex-A55 @ 1.6GHz)

• ARM Mali-G52-2EE GPU (OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0/3.0/3.1/3.2, Vulkan 1.1, OpenCL 2.0)

• LPDDR4 RAM (2/4/8 GB)

• Micro-SD card slot

• SPI flash (16/32 MB)

• Optional eMMC pluggable module (16/32/64/128/256 GB)

• Wi-Fi5 + Bluetooth 5.0, BLE

• 1x USB 2.0 Type A OTG, 2x USB 2.0 Type A HOST, 1x USB 3.0 Type A Host

Introduction

Five days ago, I received the Orange Pi RV2 board I ordered. For about 54 EUR / 64 USD (+ shipping), this board has very attractive features, in particular:

Top view - Source Orange Pi

• 8 GB of LPDDR4X RAM (2 and 4 GB options exist)

Linux 6.17 has just been released, and it’s already running here at Root Commit.

The first system it’s been running on is this Toradex Verdin iMX8M Mini SOM (below the heat sink!) on the Dahlia Carrier board. I’m using this board for a medical device project at the moment.

Here are my notes for building Linux 6.17 for this device:

• Get the Linux 6.17 sources (through git or tarball)

Last week, I gave a “How to test a specific version of Linux on PC hardware” talk at the Alposs conference in Echirolles near Grenoble, France.

This was a very nice technical conference, with 330 participants (+110 compared to last year), organized in the city hall of Echirolles near Grenoble and by Belledonne Communications (the editors of Linphone) and OW2, an international association of Free Software professionals. Echirolles has a very dynamic orientation, deploying Free and Open Source Software in many of its services, thus improving the services offered to its citizens.

If you have other boards, read on, these instructions support multiple other Raspberry Pi boards.

Hardware

In this tutorial, we assume you have the Raspberry Pi Debug Probe to access the board’s serial port. You could use the GPIO UARTs too, but they are neither enabled by default at the bootloader level nor as a kernel console. Enabling them for serial console access would slightly complicate these instructions.