Checking Out Debian and Linux SDK for VideoStrong VS-RD-RK3399 Board

VideoStrong VS-RD-RK3399 (aka VS-RK3399) is a features-packed development board powered by Rockchip RK3399 hexa core core processor which offers an alternative to Firefly-RK3399 board. The company sent me a development kit for evaluation, and I’ve already looked into VS-RD-RK3399 hardware and SDK in the first part of the review. Today, after shortly looking into the pre-installed Android 7.1 OS to make sure the board boots fine, I’ll report my experience with Debian 9, and building it from source.

A Quick Look at Android 7.1

I connected the board to my HDMI TV, added an Ethernet cable, and after powering it, VS-RK3399 promptly booted into Android 7.1 with the following launched.

It just has a few apps pre-installed, and lack Google Play store, but as I’ve seen in the new version of the SDK, a patch for Google Play store is provided, if that’s something you need for your use case.

The version I had pre-installed was built on August 14, 2017 with Android 7.1.2 OS running on top of Linux 4.4.55 kernel.

The storage section shows plenty of space left out of the 29.12GB flash partition, and the NTFS and EXT-4 partitions of my USB drives were mounted properly.

However, Explorer app would keep on reporting all USB partitions were NOT mounted. I had to use my smartphone to transfer the screenshots over Bluetooth. Adb would have been another option. Anyway, the Android version I had on my board was pretty rough, but I can see they’ve released another Android image in VS3399 board’s MEGA folder. I have not tried it, since I’ve spent enough time playing with Android on RK3399 with TV boxes such as Yundoo Y8 and Vorke Z3.

Installing Debian

So instead I went to the aforelinked MEGA folder, and downloaded VS-RD-RK3399-linuxSDK, which not only have the SDK like last month, but also a Debian image.

So I downloaded debia_linux_20170905.rar, and the rar file in linux_update_tools, but the latter actually contains (outdated versions of) Windows based Rockchip’s AndroidTool & DriverAssistant, but since I’m using Ubuntu, I went with upgrade_tool instead just like I did for Rock64 board quick start guide.

We’ll need to enter recovery mode to flash the Debian image. While the board is running keep pressing the recovery button, press the reset button shortly, count to 2 or 3, and release the recovery button. When you connect the USB type C to USB 3.0 cable between the board and your computer, you should see the board in the kernel log (dmesg):

How we can extract the Debian firmware, and flash it with upgrade_tool:

if successful the procedure is successful, the output should like the four lines below:

and the board should have automatically rebooted to Debian 9.

Testing Debian 9 on VS-RK3399 Board

Now that the installation is complete, we can start to play with the Debian on the board. Or can’t we? There’s no menu available at all, and only the Trash icon on the desktop. If I right click I get some more menus…

So I went into Desktop Preferences, enabled some other icons, and change the right click behavior.

Now I can launch some apps such as the terminal emulator and Chromium web browser, but they don’t show on the desktop at all, despite clearly running “somewhere”…

I then noticed I can move the mouse cursor beyond he left side of the HDMI TV, so I’d assumed there must be another display enabled. I tried to connect Dodocool DC30S hub to the USB type C port since it supports DisplayPort, but I get no signal on my other monitor, so the extra display must be connected via eDP or MIPI DSI, and the company sent me neither.

I could see the image is based on Linaro ALIP rootfs, so I connected to the board via SSH, hoping that linaro/linaro username and password would work, and they did:

The image runs Debian 9 with Linux 4.4.55, and we have a 29GB rootfs, and 3877 MB memory in total.

We can get some more details about the CPU with 2 Cortex A72 cores clocked at up to 1.8 GHz, and 4 Cortex A53 cores clocked at up to 1.416 GHz:

The Gigabit Ethernet port and WiFi module are both detected:

I could not find Bluetooth however using “communication”, and the list of buses or bridges only showed USB ports, no PCI(e) interfaces:

lspci did not return anything either.

Build a Debian Image from Source

Since the image is not really usable with LCD display, I won’t perform more tests on Debian firmware, and instead will work with the SDK, trying to build my own image from source. We can extract the Linux SDK we’ve gotten from the MEGA link:

…and follow / adapt the instructions in VS-RK3399 Linux SDK Compile and build (EN).pdf document found in VS-RD software datasheet folder.

The company recommends a build machine running Ubuntu 14.04 / 16.04 64-bit, and I installed some dependencies on my Ubuntu 16.04 computer:

as well as ARM/ARM64 GCC toolchain and other tools and libraries:

We can now build u-boot:

It should only take a few seconds, and we can make sure the build went fine:

Next up is the the Linux kernel:

We have to choose an image to build with the dts file of our choice:

The -edp image is with eDP LCD display, -mipi is for MIPI LCD display, and the -dulelcd must be for both (“dual LCD”). So there’s no option for no LCD at all right now, and I’m not sure why there’s a need for three DTS files for the board, as surely this should be possible to select/configure the LCD outputs are runtime (TBC). But let’s use the MIPI LCD one:

I did not go that well, as the build failed:

I tried with rk3399-videostrong-board-edp.img again, and same error, but I noticed more details by scrolling up:

We can see gsl3673.c file is missing:

So I renamed the c-old file to c, and could complete the build:

Now we can build the complete firmware from source using buildroot:

The build all script will take a long while as it downloads and builds all packages. It took over 2 hours on my machine. I ended with:

It looks OK, except for the script failed to remove one file/directory. Let’s try to create the firmware file:

Sadly that part failed too because of conflicts with a patch:

That failures means the rootfs was not built, and the script is so bad did not stop during mpp build failure, and continued building other libs:

I have not tried to fix the issue, as I don’t know how many other issues are hidden in that big piles of code. VideoStrong should look into and provide an SDK that actually builds.. In case the build works, we should get rootfs.img file that can be flashed with AndroidTool if we follow the instructions in the PDF file.

However, you’ll also be able to flash the files one by one using upgrade_tool in Linux, no need to have a Windows machine for any part of the process.

It’s hard to recommend VS-RD-RK3399 if you are an individual who want a platform for development since software support and documentation are rather poor, but if you are a company that plans to order in quantity, you should have direct support from the company, and you can contact them via Alibaba’s VideoStrong page. If you have a good skills, and are ready to work to solve whatever issues, you can also purchase the board for $168.32 (2GB/16GB) or $213.29 (4GB/32GB) on GearBest where it is sold under the MECOOL brand (Coupon GBCNA will give a 14% discount), or Aliexpress. For reference, Firefly-RK3399 in equivalent memory/storage configuration sells for $179 and $219 on Aliexpress. It’s also listed on Amazon US for $149.99/$199.99.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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