Armbian on the Asus Tinker Board update

It’s been an eventful few weeks, as one of the few early adopters of the tinker board and someone willing to try anything, I’ve spent quite a bit of time learning about device trees, kernel drivers, and build scripts.  Not to say I’ve gotten particularly good at them, however.

[UPDATE May 5, 2017]

Debugging on the current progress has begun to accelerate, more developers jumping in to help, and ASUS finally posting a git repo with the kernel source.  Updates:

Kernel 4.11 now boots.  No 4k, no WiFi/BT.  Seems very stable all in all otherwise, beginning of Mali support added

For Kernel 4.4, the reboot bug that was present in Armbian (hang on reboot) was fixed via a pretty hackish method of simply re-enabling the SD card power supply right before shutdown and kicking the logic supply back to low-speed 3.3V for reboot.

On both kernels, audio debugging is underway, it appears to be a pulseaudio and ALSA configuration issue more than anything.


As of today the Asus Tinker Board Armbian image using the legacy 4.4 kernel has support for 4k video output, wifi, the beginnings of bluetooth (debugging why the adapter isn’t coming up, looking into the drivers).  The device tree has been updated to what was state of the art 2 weeks ago, again, bleeding edge and most likely still not 100%

I’m nearly burnt out on it, so you’ll see me spending some time with my less maddening hobbies for the next week or so.  It didn’t help that going in I knew exactly zero about device trees, build scripts, kconfigs, or patching the linux kernel.

Give me a yell on the forums with the feedbacks, or register here and share.

5 thoughts on “Armbian on the Asus Tinker Board update

  1. I’ve had armbian running on the tinkerboard for a couple of days, I could have sworn reboot was working fine..but today…reboot stopped working…been looking everywhere and found your site, thanks for posting.

    Can you post the URL for the git repo?

    Also, my download of armbian seems to have been 4.11, I used this download link:
    https://dl.armbian.com/tinkerboard/Ubuntu_xenial_next_desktop.7z

    ARMBIAN 5.27 stable Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS 4.11.0-rockchip

    1. I have patched 4.4 to reboot properly, also it support wifi and 4k, whereas 4.11 does not so far. To my knowledge no Tinker Board Armbian image has ever rebooted properly until https://github.com/armbian/build/pull/665

      It looks like an oddity with the rockchip mmc drivers not having a soft reset definition, there is a patch for 4.12 that covers that, I haven’t seen if it can be implemented on 4.11 as yet. The 4.4 patch, for whatever reason, does not work with 4.11, there is a lot of work on Rockchip’s side going into the mainline kernel, I’m guessing halfway into implementing the proper fix they’ve broken the hack.

      Armbian’s Build System: https://github.com/armbian/build

      The 4.4 kernel is based on the MiQi repo, I’m tempted to fork it and apply all the patches currently in Armbian’s build system, it’s getting a little excessive as the MiQi source does not appear to be actively publicly developed.

    2. Thought I would give you an update if still interested, Armbian is at 5.33 for Tinker Board, all kernels have reboot functioning properly, all kernels have WiFi. Mainline is 4.13. Myy is working on the video codec VPU for mainline, and I am doing some house cleaning on various incomplete userland functions (Mainline HDMI hotplug, etc)

  2. Thought I have Purchease the TinkerBoard last month 28.12.2017 and I am Install the 3 above versions
    1st Tinker OS latest
    2nd Lubuntu OS Latest
    3rd Armbian latest version 5.35 install After two days its work on very nicely 1st & 2nd OS but its no Output Audio any way I Will Try to 3 more times Reinstall the OS But no way in Audio
    I am So Tired so SAD so Please help How to Way the Output Audio
    In Armbian Tinker board
    Yours
    M.Narayanan
    Thanking U

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