Pine64

The Pine64 is a cost-optimized board sporting ARMv8 (64-bit ARM) capable cores.

= Identification = There is a pine cone like logo next to the uSD slot, also it says "Pine64" under the logo. Also on the SoC there is a quite prominent "A64" print.

On the back of the device, the following is printed: Designed in Silicon Valley, California. Built in Silicon Delta, China.

The PCB has the following silkscreened on it: A64-DB-Rev B 2015-12-17

In android, under Settings->About Tablet, you will find:
 * Model Number: Pine A64
 * Build Number: tulip_t1-eng 5.1.1 LVY4BE 20151210 test-keys

Different models
So far there are three different models:
 * The Pine64 with 512MB DRAM
 * The Pine64+ with 1GB DRAM
 * The Pine64+ with 2GB DRAM

The last two seem to be identical apart from the installed DRAM size. Differences between the Pine64 and the Pine64+ are:
 * The Pine64 only supports Fast Ethernet. So the PHY chip will be a Realtek 8201 instead of the 8211 on the bigger model. The 8211 speaks RGMII, while the 8201 is using the MII interface. This requires differences in the DT.
 * The smaller model will lack the connectors for the touchscreen, LCD screen and the camera port.

= Sunxi support =

Current status
Boots recent kernel (4.4) with some patches and basic support: SMP, UART, MMC (uSD card), RTC, GPIO (and clocks, timer, pinctrl, of course). At the moment uses the firmware from the Android image, which requires the kernel (and if needed the initrd) to be packaged into an Android kernel image and dd'ed to an Android partition on the SD card. Booted Ubuntu-Core 14.04-3 AArch64 from an SD partition successfully.

Find more information in the firmware log and kernel dmesg.

Images
Get a first, basic image here. For instructions see the README.md in there for now.

BSP
Allwinner's BSP contains an arm64 Linux kernel based on Linaro's LSK-3.10.65 (includes Linaro and Android patches). It has some nasty patches on top which require the kernel to be entered in Aarch64 EL3 mode. This violates the Linux arm64 booting protocol and prevents upstream kernels to be booted with the Allwinner firmware in that bundle.

This released/leaked code does not match what's on the provided Android images. The firmware in the image enters the kernel in (secure) EL1, which is officially not supported, but happens to work so far.

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

Sunxi/Legacy U-Boot
The U-Boot tree in the BSP package (using a sun50iw1p1 target) does not compile, also the port in there is only for 32-bit. To boot 64-bit kernels, they warm-reset to 64-bit just before entering the kernel, apparently jumping into the ARM Trusted firmware code, which will then enter the kernel in the secure(?) EL1 exception level. This currently denies any virtualization (KVM) to be used.

The U-Boot from the supplied Android image is severely crippled:
 * It can only read from its own partitions. Those partitions are described in a table located at exactly 20 MB in the SD card and follow their NAND partitioning scheme, described also here. They can, but don't need to follow the DOS partitioning scheme on the card. A tool to create this table will be published later.
 * Although there is a MMC command and U-Boot apparently can access the SD card, it does not allow any U-Boot magic with it, so no direct loading or accessing filesystems.
 * Of course there is no network support whatsoever.
 * Booting kernels is also limited to either the bootm or boota commands. bootm expects an U-Boot image file (uImage), but it needs to be tagged as architecture "arm" (not arm64), because the running U-Boot is actually 32-bit. Consequently it also just treats it as an ARM(32) kernel, so it will not boot an arm64 kernel (but haven't actually tested whether an ARM(32) kernel would work).
 * So only boota works, because only this is wired up to do the RMR access to reach 64-bit mode. Boota expects an "Android boot image", which is described here and can be created with the Python script from the same location.
 * Although this U-Boot version is very DTB savvy (it uses the DTB for itself even), the DT is full of non-standard nodes and properties. No upstream kernel can even closely boot with that. Although the DT can be found (and changed) at the offset 0x1383000 on the SD card, replacing it is not a real option, since U-Boot will most likely refuse to boot unless given the expected DTB. It needs to be worked out whether one could provide a DT that satisfies both world, but that sounds quite hackish anyway.
 * Loading a DT at an arbitrary address in memory will not work either, because the boota command will always supply the U-Boot internal DTB to the kernel. The only way to get something working is to actually replace the DTB in the U-Boot data segment(!) and hope for the best. Luckily the supplied DT is rather big (68K), so there is plenty of space to use for that. Just be sure to not write beyond that or U-Boot will crash (tested ;-)

Mainline U-Boot
No support yet.

Sunxi/Legacy Kernel
Use the  file.

Mainline kernel
No support yet, but being worked on.

= Tips, Tricks, Caveats =

Boot sequence
The A64 SoC is wired to come out of reset in 32-bit monitor mode. As other Allwinner devices, the A64 SoC starts executing BROM code (mapped at address 0), which is consequently ARM32 code. The complete BROM code can be found at address 0x2c00 and has a total length of 32KB. To enter FEL mode, powering on the board without a SD card inserted. If the code does not detect a FEL condition, it will load 32KB from sector 16 (8 KByte) of the microSD card to SRAM and will execute this. At least the first instructions of this code need to be still 32-bit ARM code.

The Allwinner firmware continues in 32-bit, loading U-Boot (32-bit also) from microSD card at sector 38192 (19.096 KByte). Only just before it starts the kernel, it does a RMR write to reset the SoC in AArch64 execution state and starts the kernel by putting its load address in the RVBAR register.

FEL mode
The Pine64 board will fail over to FEL mode if it doesn't detect a card present in the µSD slot.

A tricky and potentially confusing part is that the only Micro USB receptacle (labelled as "POWER JACK") is used exclusively for providing power to the board and is not connected to any USB controller in the SoC. The actual USB OTG controller in the SoC is connected to the upper USB host receptacle. So it needs a somewhat special USB cable (A male to A male) or an adapter (A male to Mini/Micro B female) to connect your Pine64 board to your desktop PC, which is running the sunxi-fel tool.

As soon as you boot your Pine64 into FEL mode (remember, don't insert a SD card) you should find a new USB device:

$ lsusb Bus 001 Device 005: ID 1f3a:efe8

$ ./sunxi-fel version AWUSBFEX soc=00001689(A64) 00000001 ver=0001 44 08 scratchpad=00017e00 00000000 00000000

Expansion headers
Some documentation about the pins is available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0cEs0lxTtL3bXFhVUg4WVVrZHM/view

AXP803 PMIC
The default voltages after cold boot seem to be at least a little bit off. For example, the voltage on the Euler connector's 3.3V pin is in fact 3.0V until the Allwinner's bootloader configures the PMIC (very likely the default voltage from DCDC1). It means that the U-Boot bootloader will have to configure AXP803 early and relying on the defaults is not a very good idea.

The DRAM voltage is provided from DCDC5, which is set to 1.5V by default according to the AXP803 manual. Moreover, the AXP803 manual is explicitly recommending to use DCDC5 specifically for DRAM. This is safe even with 1.35V DDR3L chips, because they are compatible with 1.5V too.

Pine A64 Hardware Info

= Serial port / UART =



The board connects 4 of the SoCs UART to easily accessible header pins. There is UART2 on the RPi connector, also UART3 and UART4 on the Euler connector. UART0 is the main UART used by Allwinner's firmware for boot and debug messages and is accessible on pins 29 (TXD), 30 (RXD), 25/34 (GND) on the Euler connector (this is not mentioned in the official connector description). Alternatively you can use the UART0 on the EXP connector, accessible on pins 7 (TXD), 8 (RXD), 9 (GND).

Using screen to connect to the UART0 for example on OS X:

$ sudo screen /dev/cu.usbserial 115200

All of the UARTs use 3.3V voltage levels. Look at UART howto for further instructions.

A connected UART cable is leaking power and this causes some annoyances. For example, unplugging and plugging back a power cable does not reboot the board cleanly. Thus ensuring the availability of a reset button is recommended for doing any reasonable software development.

The board does not have a hardware reset button out of the box, but a button can be easily connected to the appropriate pin on the expansion connector. Also a standard micro switch (upright version) can be soldered on the board next to the USB sockets to ease early development ;-)

= Pictures =

= See also = wiki.pine64.org Further info on the hardware and firmware

forum.pine64.org Discussion on pine64

Manufacturer images
Pine A64 Android release and Linux BSP