This repository contains an UEFI firmware implementation based on EDK2 for various RK3588 boards.

It delivers a PC-like standardized boot experience, supporting multiple operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, BSD and VMware ESXi.

Support levels are categorized into two tiers: Platinum and Bronze.

Platinum devices are considered to have the best overall support, based on factors such as:

• Device Tree and peripherals compatible with mainline Linux. [Required]
• Active interest from the vendor in supporting their hardware.
• Hardware design choices:
  • If an Ethernet port is present, Realtek PCIe NIC (for netboot) or RK GMAC. [Required]
  • SPI NOR flash for dedicated firmware storage. [Preferred]

Bronze devices may have limitations such as:

• Missing one or more required features listed above.
• Low interest from vendors and/or the community.
• Lack of proper validation, potentially affecting functionality.

Note that this list is subject to change at any time as devices gain better support or fall behind.

• Radxa ROCK 5B
• Radxa ROCK 5A
• Radxa ROCK 5 ITX
• Orange Pi 5
• Orange Pi 5 Plus
• Khadas Edge2
• BuzzTV P6
• FriendlyELEC NanoPC T6
• FriendlyELEC NanoPi R6C
• FriendlyELEC NanoPi R6S
• FriendlyELEC NanoPC CM3588-NAS
• ameriDroid Indiedroid Nova

• Radxa ROCK 5B+
• Fydetab Duo
• Firefly AIO-3588Q
• Firefly ITX-3588J
• Firefly ROC-RK3588S-PC / StationPC Station M3
• Mekotronics R58X
• Mekotronics R58 Mini
• Mixtile Blade 3
• FriendlyELEC NanoPi M6
• Hinlink H88K

• One of the supported devices.

• Storage for the firmware: SPI NOR flash (included with some devices), SD card or eMMC.

• Quality power supply that can provide at least 15 W. Depending on the peripherals you use, more may be needed.

  Note: on Mixtile Blade 3, a fixed voltage higher than 5V must be supplied. The board cannot power any external peripherals if the input voltage is just 5V. USB-PD negotiation is not supported by firmware.

• HDMI or DisplayPort (USB-C) screen capable of at least 1080p 60Hz.

• Optionally, if display is not available or for debugging purposes, an UART adapter capable of 1500000 baud rate (e.g. USB CH340, CP2104).

The latest version can be obtained from https://github.com/edk2-porting/edk2-rk3588/releases.

If your platform is not yet supported, using an image meant for another device is NOT recommended. Although they are generally similar, voltage setup can happen to be different and you may risk damaging the board. External peripherals are unlikely to work either.

UEFI can be flashed to either an SPI NOR flash, SD card or eMMC module:

• For removable SD or eMMC (easiest), you can simply use balenaEtcher, RPi Imager or dd.

• For SPI NOR or soldered eMMC, instructions can be found at: https://wiki.radxa.com/Rock5/install/spi.

  In short, you can flash the image from Linux booted on the device or by using RKDevTool on another computer. The latter requires entering Maskrom mode on the device. The way to do this slightly varies across platforms, refer to your vendor documentation.

Warning: these operations will erase data on the storage device. Make a backup first!

If you wish to have both UEFI and an OS on the same SD or eMMC device: flash UEFI first, then create any additional partitions without touching the first, reserved one. Steps for updating the firmware in this case can be found here.

Note: Using SPI NOR (if present) is recommeded, as it leaves the other storage options free for other purposes. Additionally, SD/eMMC will limit the firmware's ability to access its own storage (variable store) when an OS is running. This feature is mostly used by OS installers to create the boot menu options, it is not mandatory.

If the flashing process has been done correctly, you should see the status LED blinking (if present), and shortly after, the platform's boot logo with a progress bar at the bottom on the connected display.

At this stage, you can press Esc to enter the firmware setup, F1 to launch the UEFI Shell, or, provided you also have an UEFI bootloader/app on a storage device, you can let the system automatically run that, which is the default behavior if no action is taken.

Check the Supported OSes and Supported peripherals in UEFI sections to see what's currently possible with this firmware.

Also check the configuration options described below, some of which may need to be changed depending on the OS used.

If you experience any issues, please see the Troubleshooting section.

The UEFI provides a few configuration options, like CPU frequency, PCIe/SATA selection for an M.2 port, fan control, etc. These can be viewed and changed using the UI configuration menu (under Device Manager -> Rockchip Platform Configuration).

Configuration through the user interface is fairly straightforward and help/navigation information is provided around the menus.

• CPU clocks are set to 816 MHz (boot default) on platforms without a cooling fan included. If you have adequate cooling, go to the configuration menu -> CPU Performance and set all Cluster Presets to Maximum.

For rich Linux support, it is recommended to enable Device Tree mode. You can do so by going to the configuration menu -> ACPI / Device Tree and setting Config Table Mode to Device Tree.

The firmware provides two compatibility modes:

• Vendor - compatible with Rockchip SDK Linux 5.10/6.1 kernel only.
• Mainline - compatible with generic upstream Linux 6.10 or newer kernel. This option is under active development and may lack certain features. Therefore, it is always recommended to use the latest kernel and firmware available in order to benefit from better device support.

Platinum platforms will have the Mainline option enabled by default, while Bronze ones will fall back to Vendor.

It is also possible to provide a custom DTB and overlays. To enable this, go to the configuration menu -> ACPI / Device Tree and set Support DTB override & overlays to Enabled.

The firmware will now look for overrides in the partition of a selected boot option / OS loader. In most cases, this will be the first FAT32 EFI System Partition.

Important: The dtb directory must be placed at the root of the partition. It should not be inside any sub-directory.

• The base DTB must be located at \dtb\base\<PLATFORM-DT-NAME>.dtb.

• The overlays can be placed in:

  • \dtb\overlays - will be applied first, regardless of the platform.
  • \dtb\overlays\<PLATFORM-DT-NAME> - will be applied only to the specified platform.

  and must have the .dtbo extension.

<PLATFORM-DT-NAME> can be:

In the absence of a custom base DTB override, the overlays are applied on top of the firmware-provided DTB.

The firmware applies some fix-ups to its own DTB depending on the user settings (e.g. PCIe/SATA/USB selection, making SATA overlays redundant). These fix-ups are not applied to a custom base DTB - overlays must be used instead.

If the application of an overlay fails (e.g. due to it being invalid in regard to the base DTB), all overlays are discarded, including those that got applied up to that point.

If the custom base DTB is invalid, the firmware-provided one will be passed to the OS instead.

This entire process is logged to the serial console. There's currently no other way to see potential errors.

If the storage is only used for UEFI and nothing else, simply download the latest image and flash it as described in the Getting started section.

If it is also used by an OS and has additional partitions, only part of the image needs to be applied. This can be done with the dd tool:

dd if=FIRMWARE.img of=DESTINATION bs=512 skip=64 seek=64 conv=notrunc

FIRMWARE.img is the firmware image for your platform. E.g. edge2_UEFI_Release_v0.8.img.

DESTINATION is the destination storage that you wish to update the firmware on. E.g. /dev/sdb.

Here we skip the GPT and copy the firmware starting at offset 0x8000 (64 blocks * 512 bytes block size) until its end. See Flash layout for more details.

Below you can find some basic debugging information. If none of this helps, please see the Advanced troubleshooting section.

If your device has an activity LED, the firmware will blink it in different patterns to indicate the current system status.

1. Immediately after power on, the LED should start pulsing quickly. This indicates that the firmware is initializing.

2. After initialization (usually takes less than 5 seconds), the LED will switch to a short pulsing every 2 seconds or so. This indicates that the firmware is ready and waiting for user action or the countdown to boot automatically. The display output should also be enabled at this point.

3. When the firmware boots an OS and is about to exit, the LED will stop blinking.

If the LED:

• does not light up after power on, this means the firmware has not managed to load up at all.

• gets stuck in either on or off state after blinking a few times and never recovers, something went wrong and the firmware has crashed or frozen.

  Note that it is only expected to stop as described at point 3) above.

In case you don't have easy access to the MaskROM button, UEFI provides a boot option for that purpose, accessible either via the Boot Manager or F4 key during splash screen.

Additionally, holding the Recovery (or volume up) button while powering on the device will also enter MaskROM mode.

Make sure you've flashed the firmware correctly and that it is the version designed for your device. In most cases this is the culprit.

Assuming the firmware loads fine:

• The display must support a resolution of at least 1080p at 60 Hz.
• If you're using HDMI and the system has two ports, only one will work. Try both.
• If you're using USB-C to DisplayPort, only one orientation of the USB-C connector will work. Check both.

If you are not able to get any display output, the only way to interact with UEFI is via the serial console.

This has been observed in cases where firmware was present on more than one device (SPI NOR, eMMC or SD). This is not a supported scenario, because UEFI will be unable to accurately determine the boot device it belongs to. The solution is to unplug or erase devices that may have other firmware on them.

• Try a different port.
• If you're using USB-C, 3.0 devices will only work in one orientation of the connector. Check both.
• Make sure the power supply and cable are good.

• Only Realtek PCIe and USB controllers are supported. Native Gigabit provided by RK3588 isn't.

• Some boards with Realtek NICs do not have a MAC address set at factory and will show-up as being all zeros in UEFI, possibly preventing the adapter from obtaining an IP address.

  You can easily fix this by writing the MAC address manually:

  1. Boot into Linux and open up a terminal. The commands below apply to Armbian with legacy kernel.

  2. Install the headers for your kernel version:

     sudo apt install -y linux-headers-legacy-rk35xx

  3. Clone Realtek PGTool and build the driver:

     git clone https://github.com/redchenjs/rtnicpg
     cd rtnicpg
     make

  4. Unload all Realtek modules and load the driver built above:

     sudo rmmod pgdrv
     sudo ./pgload.sh

     Note: make sure there aren't any remaining Realtek modules loaded after this, except for the new pgdrv.
     If you have r8125 built-in, you might have to reboot with initcall_blacklist=rtl8125_init_module as a kernel parameter (in Grub).

  5. Burn a MAC address into the eFuses:

     For only one NIC:

     sudo ./rtnicpg-aarch64-linux-gnu /efuse /nodeid 00E04C001234

     For two or more:

     sudo ./rtnicpg-aarch64-linux-gnu /efuse /# 1 /nodeid 00E04C001234
     sudo ./rtnicpg-aarch64-linux-gnu /efuse /# 2 /nodeid 00E04C001235

     00E04C001234 is an example address. You can generate random and unique ones using: https://www.macvendorlookup.com/mac-address-generator

  Note: the number of eFuses is limited, thus MAC addresses can only be changed a few times.

The firmware will log detailed information to the serial console when using a debug version. See the release notes for details on how to obtain this version.

1. The debug image needs to be flashed in place of the existing one.

2. Connect the UART2 RX, TX and GND pins on your device (check vendor documentation) to the UART adapter on your other computer.

3. Open up a serial terminal (PuTTY on Windows, stty on Linux) set to 1500000 baud rate and 8n1 (default).

4. Power on the device.

You should be able to see many debug messages being printed to the console. If that's not the case, double check the connections (swap RX/TX), make sure the adapter is functional and configured correctly.

The logs should give an insight of what's going on. If you need help analyzing them, feel free to open an issue ticket.

You can open issues related to UEFI at https://github.com/edk2-porting/edk2-rk3588/issues.

Please include as many details as possible: expected behavior, what actually happens, steps to reproduce, serial logs, etc.

Also check the existing issues in case yours might be already reported.

The firmware can only be built on Linux currently. For Windows use WSL.

1. Install required packages:

   For Ubuntu/Debian:

   sudo apt install git gcc g++ build-essential gcc-aarch64-linux-gnu acpica-tools python3-pyelftools uuid-dev python-is-python3 device-tree-compiler

   For Arch Linux:

   sudo pacman -Syu
   sudo pacman -S git base-devel gcc dtc aarch64-linux-gnu-binutils aarch64-linux-gnu-gcc aarch64-linux-gnu-glibc python python-pyelftools iasl --needed

2. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/edk2-porting/edk2-rk3588.git --recursive
   cd edk2-rk3588

3. Build UEFI (ROCK 5B for example, check list of platform configs):

   ./build.sh --device rock-5b --release Release # (or Debug)

If you get build errors, it is very likely that you're still missing some dependencies. The list of packages above is not complete and depending on the distro you may need to install additional ones. In most cases, looking up the error messages on the internet will point you at the right packages.

The variable store is not included in the flash image, in order to prevent overwriting it and to maintain the user settings across updates.

The firmware expects these exact offsets, do not change them.

Most of the UEFI code is licensed under the default EDK2 license, which is BSD-2-Clause-Patent.

Some components ported from Linux and Rockchip's U-Boot fork are licensed as GPL-2.0 (check SPDX-License-Identifier).

The license for some of the blobs in the misc/rkbin/ directory can be found at: https://github.com/rockchip-linux/rkbin/blob/master/LICENSE. Note that it also contains binaries built from open-source projects such as U-Boot (SPL), Arm Trusted Firmware and OP-TEE, having a different license.

• Hack w/ Rockchip Telegram: https://t.me/UEFIonRockchip
• Windows on R Discord: https://discord.gg/vjHwptUCa3

This firmware is based on Rockchip's initial efforts at https://gitlab.com/rk3588_linux/rk/uefi-monorepo.

For RK356x, check out the Quartz64-UEFI project at https://github.com/jaredmcneill/quartz64_uefi, from which we also reused some code.