Allwinner Sun4i/5i/6i/7i/9i (sunxi)

Various vendors are offering development boards / single-board computer based on the Allwinner SoCs. These are running various flavors of the A1x, A20, A31, and soon H3 SoCs, with different buildouts. The mach is called “sunxi”.

For some specs rather see Allwinner_Technology#A-Series.

See also Table of Hardware for supported devices and their basic technical data.

UEXT is an open standard port to provide serial, I²C and SPI expansion ports.

Patches have been back-ported from the http://linux-sunxi.org/ community, including device trees, clocks, timers, PIO, ethernet, USB, and, MMC. These patches are being mainlined as they come online by the community.

• SPL: done
• u-boot: done
• kernel: done
• rootfs: done

You have the option to boot the board from initramfs, SD card (recommended), USB storage, or NFS.

• SD/MMC
• USB EHCI/OHCI
• EMAC (A10 10/100 Mbps)
• GMAC (A20 and above, 10/100/1000 Mbps)
• SATA
• Clocks
• Timers
• SMP with HYP patches for A20
• Various devices, GPIO, IR

• NAND (have some snippets already)
• Audio
• SPI (need integration)

This section details what is required to install and upgrade OpenWrt. The generic procedure is described here: generic.flashing; these devices don't have a flash chip soldered to the PCB but an SD-Card slot.

OpenWrt firmware downloads for sunxi

You can build an SD card image directly from buildroot for your device.

• Check out trunk - https://dev.openwrt.org/wiki/GetSource
• Run make menuconfig
• Select device profile - f.e. BananaPi
• Start the build
• The built SD card images will be in bin/sunxi
• dd if=bin/sunxi/openwrt-sunxi-Bananapi-sdcard-vfat-ext4.img of=/dev/sdc

OpenWrt CC trunk images are located in snapshots/trunk/sunxi/ folder.

For example if you have Cubieboard3/Cubietruck then download these files from the server:

• openwrt-sunxi-Cubietruck-u-boot-with-spl.bin
• openwrt-sunxi-Cubietruck-uEnv.txt
• sun7i-a20-cubietruck.dtb
• openwrt-sunxi-uImage
• openwrt-sunxi-root.ext4

SD layout with 512 byte blocks:

We assume /dev/mmcblk0 is the SD card and Cubietruck is the board.

• Partition the SD card. Two partitions are created. The first is the boot partition, /dev/mmcblk0p1. The second is the root partition, /dev/mmcblk0p2.
  

  # fdisk /dev/mmcblk0
  
  Command (m for help): n
  Partition type:
     p   primary (0 primary, 0 extended, 4 free)
     e   extended
  Select (default p): p
  Partition number (1-4, default 1): 1
  First sector (2048-15523839, default 2048): 2048
  Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G} (2048-15523839, default 15523839): +15M 
  
  Command (m for help): n
  Partition type:
     p   primary (1 primary, 0 extended, 3 free)
     e   extended
  Select (default p): p    
  Partition number (1-4, default 2): 2
  First sector (32768-15523839, default 32768): 32768
  Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G} (32768-15523839, default 15523839): +240M
  
  Command (m for help): p
  
  Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 7948 MB, 7948206080 bytes
  4 heads, 16 sectors/track, 242560 cylinders, total 15523840 sectors
  Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
  Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
  I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
  Disk identifier: 0x17002d14
  
          Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
  /dev/mmcblk0p1            2048       32767       15360   83  Linux
  /dev/mmcblk0p2           32768      524287      245760   83  Linux
  
  Command (m for help): w
  The partition table has been altered!
  
  Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.

• Re-read the new partition table layout (e.g. by removing and re-inserting the SD card).
• Copy the SPL + U-boot image to the card
  

  # dd if=bin/sunxi/uboot-sunxi-Cubietruck/openwrt-sunxi-Cubietruck-u-boot-with-spl.bin of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1024 seek=8

• Create a boot (FAT32) partition.
  

  # mkfs.vfat /dev/mmcblk0p1

• Mount the boot partition.
  

  # mount -t vfat /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt

• Copy the U-Boot environment file uEnv.txt to the boot partition.
  

  # cp bin/sunxi/uboot-sunxi-Cubietruck/openwrt-sunxi-Cubietruck-uEnv.txt /mnt/uEnv.txt

• Copy the boot.scr containing needed uboot commands for loading, setting kernel parameters and booting to the boot partition.
  

  # cp bin/sunxi/sun7i-a20-cubietruck.scr /mnt/boot.scr

• Copy the device tree data to the boot partition.
  

  # cp bin/sunxi/sun7i-a20-cubietruck.dtb /mnt/dtb

• Copy the kernel image to the boot partition.
  

  # cp bin/sunxi/openwrt-sunxi-uImage /mnt/uImage

• Resize the root filesystem image to match the partition size.
  

  # resize2fs bin/sunxi/openwrt-sunxi-root.ext4 240M

• Create the root filesystem.
  

  # dd if=bin/sunxi/openwrt-sunxi-root.ext4 of=/dev/mmcblk0p2 bs=128k

• Wrap up (flush buffers and unmount boot partition).
  

  # sync
  # umount /mnt

→generic.sysupgrade

sysupgrade works out of the box, using (at least) the ext4-sdcard.img.gz files.

For further information about the SoCs, go to http://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page

• We're looking for any A31 / A80 / H3 hardware at the moment
• Hardware donations - https://dev.openwrt.org/wiki/WantedHardware
• Test GPIOs and peripherals on A13/A20 and provide feedback

List of related devices: sunxi