Template:H3 Support status

= Sunxi support =

Current status
The H3 chipset support for has been included in mainline kernels since 4.2. Most of the board functionality works out of the box, but support for many features has been added rather recently, which means that a fairly recent kernel version is required. Some features (hw accelerated crypto, graphics/video features, thermal, and DVFS) are still being worked on. For a more comprehensive list of supported features, see the status matrix for mainline kernels. In addition, legacy 3.4 kernels are available in various work-in-progress git branches.

See the Manual build section for more details.

Manual build
You can build things for yourself by following our Manual build howto and by choosing from the configurations available below.

Mainline U-Boot
Use the build target. The U-Boot repository and toolchain is described in the Mainline U-Boot howto.

The H3 boards can boot from SD, eMMC, NAND or NOR flash (if available), and via FEL using the OTG USB port. In U-Boot, loading the kernel is also supported from USB or ethernet (netboot).

Sunxi/Legacy Kernel
The 3.4 kernel from the official Allwinner's git repository does not support H3 yet. But it is possible to use one of the kernel forks, based on the lichee H3 SDK tarball:
 * Siarhei Siamashka's branch '20151207-embedded-lima-memtester-h3'
 * Yann Dirson's fork added a few more fixes and adopted most of
 * Boris Lovosevic' great initial work on Allwinner's H3 kernel

Configure this kernel using sun8i_h3_defconfig, the rest is explained in the kernel compilation guide.

Use the .fex file for generating script.bin.

When booting the legacy 3.4 kernel with the mainline U-Boot, add the following line to boot.cmd:

setenv machid 1029 setenv bootm_boot_mode sec

Some other legacy kernel repositories:
 * 3.4-lichee-based kernel, based on work by ssvb and loboris
 * Yocto support here glues together all the required parts to get this kernel to work with mainline u-boot, as well as accelerated X11/GLES support
 * A newer H3 BSP variant appeared with tons of fixes which has been made available by FriendlyARM.
 * A cleaned up fork has been adopted by Armbian project. On top of that Armbian maintains a bunch of 3.4.x patches for H3 devices.

Mainline kernel
The H3 SoC is supported by the mainline kernels. For cpufreq and thermal, a) third party patches or b) a pre-patched distro (e.g. Armbian) is needed. Although the ethernet port is accessible in U-Boot, the kernel support has stabilized only recently in kernel 4.15. HDMI support will be available in kernel 4.17.

The development process, links to patches and links to kernel fork repositories are listed on the Linux mainlining effort page. Patches can also be found from the arm-linux mailing list.

Repositories with H3 patches:
 * Ondřej Jirman's branch for H3 based orange Pi (kernel 4.16) (work-in-progress DVFS)
 * CPU frequency and voltage scaling (cpufreq)
 * Thermal regulation (if CPU heats above certain temperature, it will try to cool itself down by reducing CPU frequency)
 * HDMI output support (pulled from linux-next/master)
 * Configure on-board micro-switches to perform system power off function
 * Wireguard (https://www.wireguard.com/)

Use the device-tree binary.