HCL:Khadas Vim2

The Khadas VIM2 by Shenzhen Wesion is a single-board computer.

Technical data

Amlogic S912 SoC
- 8x Arm Cortex-A53 CPU
- Arm Mali-T860 GPU
2/3 GB RAM
16/32/64 GB eMMC
40-pin GPIO connector (not Raspberry Pi compatible)

Manual installation

U-Boot

A u-boot-khadas-vim2 package is prepared.

u-boot.bin needs to be combined with proprietary blobs to create a bootable microSD card. TBD

To boot U-Boot from microSD card rather than eMMC, you may need to erase eMMC from the vendor U-Boot:

kvim2# store init 3

Careful: This erases all partitions, so make sure you back up any valuable data before.

As of U-Boot v2019.07-rc4, booting directly from USB was not working.

Kernel

The Tumbleweed 5.1.7 kernel is lacking CONFIG_SENSORS_GPIO_FAN, so that the optional fan is not operating.

Images

Due to the proprietary Amlogic tools, openSUSE OBS cannot build bootable images for S912 yet.

Extensions to meson-tools package are in progress.

ISOs

As a workaround for non-working USB in U-Boot you can install Tumbleweed or Kubic from Ethernet. The installer can read from USB just fine. Quick and dirty, circumventing GRUB for simplicity:

dhcp
tftpboot $kernel_addr_r linux
tftpboot $ramdisk_addr_r initrd
setenv bootargs 'console=ttyAML0,115200n8 usessh=1 sshpassword=linux'
booti $kernel_addr_r $ramdisk_addr_r:$filesize $fdtcontroladdr

For using the serial console (pins 18 and 19 RX/TX, pin 17 GND) make sure the kernel command line includes console=ttyAML0,115200n8.

For installation onto microSD card (or eMMC) choose expert partitioning and ensure that the partition table is MBR, not the default of GPT which collides with the bootloader.