Manjaro ARM for Khadas Vim2 - Pro!

VIM2
1

Manjaro ARM for Khadas Vim2!

The Manjaro ARM project is proud to announce the first release for the Khadas Vim2 - Pro SBC !

These images are running the 5.6.2-2 kernel. Can be upgraded to 5.7.0-rc3

Features:

The Khadas Vim2-Pro is a VIM(Small)-form-factor board equipped with an Amlogic SOC. It comes with a powerful processor Amlogic S912 1.5 GHz 64Bit Octa Core ARM Cortex-A53 750MHz ARM Mali-T820MP3 GPU. Has 2/3GB DDR4 RAM, 16/32/64GB eMMC, integrated wi-fi and Bluetooth 5.1, as well as one USB type-C, one USB 3.0, one USB 2.0 socket, 40 GPIO, sensors, connectors for microSD memory card, Ethernet port, HDMI, IR receiver and buttons.

How to install:

Download the image/xz file from the download location. Verify that the download completed successfully.

After that, install Etcher (sudo pacman -S etcher if on Manjaro) and burn the to an SD card (8 GB or larger).

Enable Multi-boot on the Vim2 by following steps mentioned here. With this it should recognize the SD card as a bootable device and boot from it.

Features:

  • New packages from upstream and Manjaro ARM.
  • Manjaro now uses a branch based repo structure. Meaning you can now switch between arm-stable , arm-testing and arm-unstable branches by editing /etc/pacman-mirrors.conf .
  • XFCE 4.14
  • KDE Plasma 5.18
  • Panfrost for GPU - HW Acceralation
  • Wifi/BT/Audio - Works and tested in Vim2 - Pro.

Known Issues

  • Fan does not work.
  • HW Acceleration is a bit slow.
  • Wifi might not work on Vim2 - Basic model.

eMMC flash script for Vim2

It’s a script for supported Amlogic SBC designed to flash Manjaro ARM to the built-in eMMC module, so you don’t have to fiddle with DD and/or take out the eMMc module yourself.
Right now script for the Vim2 is available in the boot partition of the image. Filename is install-aml-emmc.sh, to flash Manjaro on eMMC.

Users will need official latest Android image on the eMMC while booting Manjaro from Sd-Card and running this script using root access.
Thanks to @balbes150 for this emmc install script and his kernel work.

To flash Manjaro on eMMC:

  1. Download the image of your choice.
  2. Flash it to an SD card.
  3. Boot the SD card on the device.
  4. Follow the instructions on the screen.
  5. Login to the desktop.
  6. Open Terminal with root access and run ./boot/install-aml-emmc.sh

First Time setup

This release sports the First Time setup for all images, also via SSH. This means that at first boot, you will be asked about the following:

  • keyboard layout
  • username
  • additional user groups (optional)
  • full name
  • password for that username
  • password for root
  • timezone
  • locale
  • hostname

Then the setup script will set these settings and reboot to the login screen.

Downloads:

Official Manjaro Forum Link

Donate!

Please consider supporting Manjaro ARM directly via Patreon , Ko-Fi or Open Collective .
You can also donate to our upstream, which is Arch Linux ARM .

Manjaro ARM team

3 Likes
2

@hyphop @numbqq
Can someone help me with the fan driver in mainline for vim2.
In vim3 we have the i2s node and a userspace script to make fan work as a workaround.

Until the mcu is not merged in the mainline, I might just continue to follow the workaround for vim2 as well.

Thanks.

3


1 Like
4

Thanks @hyphop
I see that this is only for vim3.
What about vim2?
Thanks.

5

its must works for all VIMx
but may be some missing i still didnt check it :wink:

6

I have just tried VIm2 Mainline uboot and I have to hold power button or enter multiboot mode using function key to make it boot into sd card with Mainline uboot.

But with Vim1 it does boot directly into Mainline uboot on sd card. @hyphop is there a possibility of booting into Mainline uboot without the need to enter multiboot mode ?

Thanks.

7

Hello,
when a kind tester will be able to test this, please report your result for manjaro on VIM2 using mainline kernel and wifi drivers provided as Arch packages (no broadcom wifi binary drivers comes with the distro image).
VIM2 and VIM1 pro share the same Ampak AP6255 wifi-bt combo chipset.
On my VIM1 pro, manjara xfce is not able to list my access point if it uses channel 13, what about VIM2 please, under the same test conditions ?
tks

8

I will try to move my wifi channel to 13 and test it.
Idk why you need to use a fixed channel instead of auto channeling.

Will get back to you with the result by tonight.

Who informed you this? Do you have source of the kernel driver? AFAIK ampak chips will always need firmware as they don’t release their drivers to the public.

I can test it on the firmware files I have and not the kernel driver as I don’t have the source code for that.

9

i do not mean broadcom has open sourced their wifi driver code . I mean ap6255 is not detected by out of the box manjaro

10

i also has seen that rpi4 has same ap6255 module, as rpi has a bigger community, maybe manjaro on rpi4 has wifi that works ok on higher 2.4ghz channel numbers?
i use channel 13 because in my environment, if offers me a good compromise, for a while now.
i am no open source ayatollah, so closed source wifi drivers are ok, provided they just work, as in android

11

Linux Kernel updated to 5.9.8 and Panfrost support is much better now.

1 Like
12

Manjaro ARM 20.12 released for Vim2.
It is fully functional and very smooth with better panfrost support and optimized utilization of big little cpu’s. Thanks to @chewitt
Updated boot script to support booting with extlinux.conf which can boot kernel 5.10 without any issue.

3 Likes
13

Hi @Spikerguy. Any updates on fan? What about user space workaround? Is it working? I’ve tried a script for VIM3 (khadas-utils/fan at master · hyphop/khadas-utils · GitHub) - it runs without errors and reports that fans speed is set to some level, but fan does not work.

14

Hello and welcome to the forum

Fan support is already upstreamed in the linux kernel. So it works once temperature crosses the threshold.

3 Likes
15

I have installed Manjaro-ARM-minimal-vim2-21.12 on my Vim2 MAX v1.2 and have problems with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Wi-Fi: It works after I copied NVRAM from Vim3:

cp /usr/lib/firmware/brcm/brcmfmac4359-sdio.khadas,vim3.txt /usr/lib/firmware/brcm/brcmfmac4359-sdio.khadas,vim2.txt

But it is slow: on Ubuntu Focal with kernel 4.9 I got ~250 megabits on 5GHz, on Manjaro 21.12 with kernel 5.15.11-1-MANJARO-ARM I got only ~55 megabits on 5GHz.
How can I fix Wi-Fi and get high speed with Manjaro?

Bluetooth:
It works for short time (1…5 minutes) after reboot, and then hangs (I can’t even scan for devices):

[root@Khadas tmp]# bluetoothctl 
Agent registered
[CHG] Controller B0:F1:EC:A3:A0:6D Pairable: yes
[bluetooth]# scan on
Failed to start discovery: org.bluez.Error.NotReady
[bluetooth]# power on
[bluetooth]# scan on
Failed to start discovery: org.bluez.Error.NotReady
Failed to set power on: org.bluez.Error.Failed
quitetooth]# 

[root@Khadas tmp]# hciconfig 
hci0:   Type: Primary  Bus: UART
        BD Address: B0:F1:EC:A3:A0:6D  ACL MTU: 1021:8  SCO MTU: 64:1
        DOWN 
        RX bytes:3755 acl:0 sco:0 events:397 errors:0
        TX bytes:68565 acl:0 sco:0 commands:399 errors:0

[root@Khadas tmp]# hciconfig hci0 up
Can't init device hci0: Connection timed out (110)

On Ubuntu Focal with kernel 4.9 I was able to use Bluetooth with same configs.
How can I troubleshot this problem and fix it?

Thank you!

16

Can you try to copy the firmware from ubuntu with kernel 4.9 to Manjaro and see if that makes any difference?

17

Can you try to copy the firmware from ubuntu with kernel 4.9 to Manjaro and see if that makes any difference?

I tried to copy Bluetooth firmware from Ubuntu with kernel 4.9 to Manjaro and it fixed hangups problem.

I opened an issue in ap6398s-firmware: Bluetooth hangs on VIM2 MAX v1.2 - wrong BCM4359C0.hcd patch file (#2) · Issues · manjaro-arm / packages / community / ap6398s-firmware · GitLab

The problem is about different Wi-Fi/Bluetooth chips on different VIM2 revisions:
VIM2 Basic has AP6356S on all board revisions
VIM2 PRO and MAX v1.1 and v1.2 has AP6359SA
VIM2 PRO and MAX v1.4 has AP6398S

UPD:
I tried to copy Wi-Fi firmware and NVRAM from Ubuntu with kernel 4.9 to Manjaro, but Wi-Fi is still slow on Manjaro (and even slower than with default Manjaro’s firmware - I got only ~16 megabits with Ubuntu’s firmware on Manjaro).

UPD2:
I tried to fdtput /boot/dtbs/amlogic/meson-gxm-khadas-vim2.dtb /soc/apb@d0000000/mmc@70000 sd-uhs-sdr104 but got following errors:

[    4.640205] brcmfmac: brcmf_chip_cores_check: CPU core not detected
[    4.640856] brcmfmac: brcmf_sdio_probe_attach: brcmf_chip_attach failed!
[    4.647575] brcmfmac: brcmf_sdio_probe: brcmf_sdio_probe_attach failed
[    4.655069] brcmfmac: brcmf_ops_sdio_probe: F2 error, probe failed -19...