D1 SDK Howto

This page walks you through building Allwinners own SDK for the D1 SoC, using the mirror we have on our server, and an adjusted git-repo manifest.

The original SDK as created by Allwinner was behind a registration wall, which includes a click-through disclaimer that is at odds with the GPL. Since we have our own mirror, this is actually open, and this howto describes how to use it.

Get git-repo

Arch Linux based distributions

pacman -S repo

Debian based distributions

apt-get install repo

Caveat: python-3

Repo downloads a copy of itself to .repo, and that version will trip over on itself if it gets started with python-2 (which is the default still on debian stable/buster).

When you run repo in the next section, and you get:

  File "/home/user/dir/.repo/repo/main.py", line 79
    file=sys.stderr)
        ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

Then you might need to switch to python-3. Here it cryptically tripped over the print() command which does not exist in python-2.

To get around this, check what python versions are available:

# ls /usr/bin/python*
/usr/bin/python   /usr/bin/python2.7  /usr/bin/python3.7   /usr/bin/python3m
/usr/bin/python2  /usr/bin/python3    /usr/bin/python3.7m

And then point alternatives to the python-3 bin:

update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/python python /usr/bin/python3.7 1

Verify:

# python --version
Python 3.7.3

You will need to restore python-2, if you want to run the repo utility that your debian system knows, as that hard depends on python 2.

update-alternatives --remove python /usr/bin/python3.7
update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/python python /usr/bin/python2.7 1

When you then run sync again, you will have to dance the same dance all over again. WTF? Git-repo developers, WTF?

Point repo at the manifest

repo init -u https://github.com/linux-sunxi/d1-sdk-manifest.git -b master -m tina-d1-open.xml

If all goes well, it will state:

repo has been initialized in /home/user/dir

Let repo get all the repositories

 repo sync