Architectures/ARM/exynos

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Introduction

The [1] ODroid XU4 series are a family of credit card-sized ARM based single board computer (SBC). Fedora 27 supports the the XU4, and closely related variant HC1 in Fedora 27 without any requirement of third party kernels or scripts to adjust official images. This documentation describes how to get started, and (will) include a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about what is supported and what is not.

Caveat

Some of the Fedora community have barely restrained [2] hostility to Exynos devices

From my point of view the devices are "best effort", I personally don't have any devices to test, the Odroid manufacturers generally don't give a shit about anything upstream and no one in the community has stepped up to be the maintainer of the (Exynos) devices

This of course also represents an opportunity for developers to step up, and to dispel that attitude with documentation and stabilization work, such that this Caveat might be removed

Targeted Hardware

We initially (2017 11) seek only to document support for the ODroid XU4 and HC1

Prerequisites

• An ODroid XU4 or HC1; Amazon also stocks a partial line of current production ODroid kit including these units and some accessories
• A hefty power supply. You'll want at least 2A and 2.5A is preferred to avoid mysterious and hard to diagnose power 'current droop' failure modes
• One or more 'better' quality SD Card (eLinux hosts a compatibility list). ODroid also sells such pre-flashed, but shipping costs are non-trivial from Korea
• A USB keyboard
• A HDMI input Monitor, or TV with an HDMI input (optional as to the HC1, which is 'headless')
• A USB mouse (optional in non-GUI environments)

For preparation of the SD card:

• Computer running any modern operating system; SD card writing software
• SD card reader / writer device (usually an USB device, but an 'in-chassis' adapter has been shown to also work fine)
• Under any reasonable Linux or OS/X operating system, the "dd" CLI tool will work to transfer a proposed image to SD media; For those preferring a GUI tool, Etcher [3], also available with a support issue environment pre-release [4] of their next periodic release cadence. That said, ** please ** read their support [5] documentation, ** before ** opening an issue [6] at GitHub

Success report

On an Odroid HC1 with kernel 4.15.0-0.rc0.git6.1.fc28.armv7hl [7] with on-board network (USB-3 bus based) and the ssd (USB-2 bus based SATA ... the HC1 has multiple USB buses) is working . This includes booting and enumerating devices properly

Background on the fix

From the Fedora mailing list:

http://www.spinics.net/lists/arm-kernel/msg606525.html [8]

So today must be your lucky day, while waiting for images to download I was browsing the ARM kernel list and noticed the exynos pull request for 4.15 [9] and low and behold there's a fix headed upstream for the usb3 issues and it applied cleanly to 4.13/4.14 so that should be fixed in 4.13.7 which might make F-27 GA because I'm such a nice individual. Only took them 7 kernel releases to fix it!

Earlier:

The system still requires the 'cpuidle.off=1' argument on the "append" line of the 'extlinux.conf' file to boot

Open Issues

Please note any: FIXME or other testing reminders here