Ported NixOS to the Radxa Rock Pi S (using the newest kernel)

Development
1

Hey guys,

I’ve been tinkering with the Radxa Rock Pi S lately and wanted to share some of my insights in case someone is interested. It’s a great SBC, but like a lot of Radxa boards, the vendor images leave you stuck on ancient 4.4 or 5.10 kernels and are poorly maintained.

All I wanted was to have a Wi-Fi gateway to connect my Prusa to the LAN in order to play with it, so I figured I might as well revive some old hardware in order to get it into my nixos homelab.

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You can check out the repo here: GitHub - invaliddayta/nixos-rockpi-s: A fully automated, plug-and-play NixOS flake for the Radxa Rock Pi S (RK3308). Builds a bootable SD image with U-Boot, RAMdisk, and serial console fixes out of the box. · GitHub

A quick overview of the current state:

  • Kernel: Running the newest kernel ([6.18.16])
  • Working: [Everything / you tell me]

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How to build:
Building the SD card image is pretty straightforward. Just clone the repo and run:

nix build .#default

Cheers!

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Thank you for sharing your work! General question here, if you don’t mind. And forgive my ignorance. Can and should the contents of such a repo be upstreamed into Nixpkgs?

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Thanks! Yes, this can actually be packaged as a tool to generate images for that board. It’s still in the early stages right now, but that’s definitely the direction it’s heading.

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