Rock4se 24.11.20250615.daa45f1 does not boot

[axelsimon]

Hello,

Release 24.11.20250615.daa45f1, which provides radxa-rock4se-nixos-sd-image-aarch64-linux.img, does not boot.

Only the board's green LED lights up, no activity on the blue LED.

The same board and SD card boot fine on a recent Armbian 25.8.0.

After being written by Balena Etcher (v1.18.11), the SD card is as follows:

Disk /dev/sda: 29.72 GiB, 31914983424 bytes, 62333952 sectors
Disk model: 1081CS0         
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x2178694e

Device     Boot Start     End Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/sda1       16384   32767   16384    8M da Non-FS data
/dev/sda2  *    32768 7800391 7767624  3.7G 83 Linux

The ext4 filesystem on /dev/sda2/ is indeed NIXOS_SD as expected.

[axelsimon]

I tried with an older release (24.11.20250427.26245db I think) and it's the same issue. The board powers on but doesn't boot, no activity on the blue LED.

[Plamper]

Same issue here. I even rebuilt the image with 25.05, but the issue persists.

[Plamper]

I managed to at least get into UBoot using the nixpkgs version. I built it using this:

NIXPKGS_ALLOW_UNFREE=1 nix-build -E '
    with import <nixpkgs> {};
    pkgsCross.aarch64-multiplatform.ubootRockPi4.override {
      defconfig = "rock-4se-rk3399_defconfig";
    }
  '

Then copy the contents from result/ to the sd-card with sudo dd if=idbloader.img of=/dev/<device> seek=64; sudo dd if=u-boot.itb of=/dev/<device> seek=16384.

The arm ISO from nixos.org seems to boot from usb initially but then video cuts out. I suspect I need to compile an image with the kernel from this repo.

[axelsimon]

Nice one @Plamper . Hope you let us know if you make progress :)

[Plamper]

After updating U-boot in my fork, the image boots. I think before I used gnome disks and etcher to flash the image, and now I used dd. Maybe that was another part of the problem. Perhaps they only copy partitioned disk space.

[Plamper]

OK, this kinda works. The only issue I found is Wi-Fi. I cannot get that to work. I am always getting -110 error codes from brcmfmac

[axelsimon]

@Plamper I tried to build a custom image from your fork, but it fails to build the Linux kernel because it can't find the ext2 (!) module:

error: builder for '/nix/store/cdjg4k3rpx1ccm472gk894xl2m3j3qzl-linux-6.16.5-modules-shrunk.drv' failed with exit code 1;
       last 3 log lines:
       > kernel version is 6.16.5
       > root module: ext2
       > modprobe: FATAL: Module ext2 not found in directory /nix/store/11m88x0brr2wv7m043nvns48gx009qiq-linux-6.16.5-modules/lib/modules/6.16.5

I still can't believe how difficult it has been to just boot this damn thing on NixOS 😀

[nabam]

Automatic builds are also failing with this error now, not sure how to fix yet. Please let me know if you find a good solution.

[axelsimon]

Related to #52 , by the way.

[axelsimon]

Same with NixOS 24.11.20250208.a45fa36 from 10 February. Just tried.

[axelsimon]

@nabam considering the lack of updates and news, should we start to consider this project archived? I don't say this in any negative way, it is simply better to help people who stumble upon projects like these immediately know the state of the project 🙂

[nabam]

Sorry, during the past months I had no time to take care of this repository. I intend to restore build there, but not sure when exactly. In the meantime I'm happy to accept contributions.

I built this repository to create images for my Quartz64 boards and have no hardware to test the rest of the images.