Board Bring-Up: Radxa Dragon Q6A with Mainline Linux and Yocto
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.
Mainline Linux 7.0 running on Arduino Q
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:
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An Arduino Q board
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A USB-C hub with external power, to power the board and to connect external devices such as USB mass storage or USB-Ethernet.
