Pineport

Fifteen essays

Setup

Kernel

Bluetooth

Closing

Appendix · reference

Porting research

What we knew before we started: every resource, repo, and known blocker for FreeBSD on RK3399S and RK3566.

This entry summarizes PORTING_RESEARCH.md in the repo root — a long-form survey written before implementation started, gathering every known resource on FreeBSD support for the RK3399S (PinePhone Pro) and RK3566 (PineTab2). Read it when you want historical context: what was already working in early 2026, what was known to be blocked, and which forum threads, repositories, and schematics to consult.

The summary below mirrors the document’s structure. The full document is the source of truth and includes ~50 hyperlinks to specific resources that this summary doesn’t reproduce.

Headline finding

The PinePhone Pro runs FreeBSD today with display, touchscreen, and battery management — but WiFi, USB, and cellular remain non-functional. The PineTab2 presents a harder challenge: its RK3566 SoC has preliminary FreeBSD support via the Quartz64 platform, but the tablet’s MIPI DSI display and BES2600 WiFi chip lack FreeBSD drivers entirely.

— PORTING_RESEARCH.md opening paragraph (the assessment as of research date; many of the identified blockers have since been knocked down — see Status).

PinePhone Pro: the existing port

Honeyguide and the pre-built image

What was working at research time

Boot to multi-user, serial via headphone jack, EFI framebuffer display, backlight, Goodix touchscreen, R/G/B notification LEDs, RK818 PMIC (custom Honeyguide driver), RTC, battery charging via USB, battery status via sysctl hw.acpi.battery, minimal Xorg via scfb software rendering.

What was blocked

WiFi/Bluetooth (AzureWave AP6255 SDIO/UART — highest-priority blocker), USB (controllers detected but no devices enumerated), cellular modem (Quectel EG25-G — blocked by USB), audio (no I2S driver), cameras (no V4L2/media framework), GPU acceleration (Mali T860 — panfrost work needed), all sensors (accelerometer, gyro, proximity, compass, ambient light).

Bootloader and SPI flash

RK3399S vs RK3399

The RK3399S is binned and voltage-locked, running ~20% slower for smartphone thermals. Linux uses a dedicated rk3399-s.dtsi for the DVFS OPP table modifications. FreeBSD has supported the RK3399 since late 2018 (Phabricator review D16732, Emmanuel Vadot); existing drivers cover RK808 PMIC, CRU clock, GPIO, I²C, SD/MMC, UART, cpufreq. The PinePhone Pro port adds an RK818 PMIC driver, RTC, and battery charger/monitor.

Driver-by-driver gaps and porting priorities

PineTab2: building on the Quartz64 foundation

RK3566 status in FreeBSD today

Preliminary support via the Quartz64 platform. Definitive forum thread: “How to run FreeBSD on new boards built on Rockchip 35XX”. Soren (sos@FreeBSD.org) hosts installable images at people.freebsd.org/~sos/ARM64/RockChip/. Community contributor covacat added eMMC HS200 (198 MHz, ~150 MB/s), EQOS Ethernet (940 Mbit/s FDX), and clock-tree fixes.

Recommended boot path: Tianocore EDK2 UEFI via jaredmcneill’s quartz64_uefi. Supports both ACPI and FDT modes. PineTab2 not yet in the supported list but should slot in.

What works on RK3566 today: eMMC and microSD (with covacat’s patches), USB 2.0, HDMI (DW-HDMI driver, covacat fixed a deadlock), GPIO/I²C/ SPI/PWM/UART via DT overlays, Gigabit Ethernet at 1 Gbps, partial PCIe (resource allocation bugs — see bugs.freebsd.org #281722).

Critical gotcha: tsadc@fe710000 causes reboots during boot on some RK3566 boards — work around with fdt rm /tsadc@fe710000 in loader.conf.

What makes the PineTab2 harder than the Quartz64

PineTab2 device tree

In mainline Linux via Heiko Stuebner’s rockchip tree: rk3566-pinetab2-v0.1.dts, rk3566-pinetab2-v2.0.dts, shared rk3566-pinetab2.dtsi. Submitted by Manuel Traut and Alexander Warnecke. Not in the FreeBSD source tree. U-Boot has a pinetab2-rk3566_defconfig. Compile the DTB from Linux sources manually — many nodes reference drivers that don’t exist on FreeBSD, but the DTB still compiles and the unbound nodes simply don’t attach.

OpenBSD as a reference point

OpenBSD added RK3566/RK3568 support in OpenBSD 7.3 (April 2023). Supported boards: Quartz64 A/B, Firefly ROC-RK3566-PC, NanoPi R5S, Radxa ROCK 3A. PineTab2 not listed. OpenBSD developer bluerise contributed to quartz64_uefi.

Cross-compiling and image layout

Cross-compile from amd64

cd /usr/src
make -j$(sysctl -n hw.ncpu) TARGET=arm64 TARGET_ARCH=aarch64 buildworld
make -j$(sysctl -n hw.ncpu) TARGET=arm64 TARGET_ARCH=aarch64 \
  buildkernel KERNCONF=GENERIC

Object files end up in /usr/obj/usr/src/arm64.aarch64/. On an AMD FX-8350, full cross-build is approximately 2 hours. We cross-build on honor (FreeBSD 15 amd64) — see Build environment.

Disk image layout for Rockchip boards

Rockchip U-Boot is written to raw sectors, not as a partition:

OffsetContent
Sector 64 (32 KB)idbloader.bin — TPL + SPL
Sector 20480 (10 MB)u-boot.itb — U-Boot proper + ATF
~16 MBEFI System Partition (FAT32, 20 MB)
After ESPFreeBSD UFS root

Flash with dd if=idbloader.bin of=/dev/sdX bs=512 seek=64 conv=notrunc. For EDK2 UEFI, same offsets with idblock.bin and BOARD_EFI.itb. Kwiboo’s u-boot-rockchip fork with CONFIG_EFI_LOADER=y is confirmed working for RK3566.

Device tree handling in FreeBSD

Two source locations: Linux-imported DTS at sys/contrib/device-tree/src/arm64/rockchip/, FreeBSD-specific overlays at sys/dts/arm64/overlays/. DTBs install to /boot/dtb/. Overlays declared in loader.conf as fdt_overlays="overlay1.dtbo,overlay2.dtbo". To swap base DTB, fdt_file="myboard.dtb". FreeBSD can also boot ACPI mode via EDK2 UEFI, bypassing FDT entirely. Useful debugging tip from gonzo: sysctl -b hw.fdt.dtb | dtc -I dtb dumps the runtime device tree.

See Writing a device-tree overlay for our overlay workflow.

Pine64 hardware documentation

Both boards have full schematics, PCB component placement, and datasheets at files.pine64.org/doc/. The PinePhone Pro UART console uses the 3.5 mm headphone jack at 1,500,000 baud (8N1) with hardware privacy switch #6 enabled. Must be 3.3 V TTL — 5 V will damage the SoC. The PinePhone Pro was officially discontinued in August 2025 due to low sales; refurbished units and spare parts remain available for two years.

The PineTab2 UART uses a dedicated USB-C UART dongle (ships in the box) at 1,500,000 baud, plugged into the USB-C port furthest from the power button.

For PinePhone Pro, the highest-impact contributions identified were: USB host controller debugging (unblocks modem, networking, peripherals), WiFi driver porting (brcmfmac SDIO), and upstreaming (find a FreeBSD committer to mentor merging the DT and RK818 PMIC driver into CURRENT).

For PineTab2: start with a headless boot via the Quartz64 DTB, compile the PineTab2 DTB from Linux mainline, use micro-HDMI with DW-HDMI for graphical output, bypass BES2600 entirely with a USB WiFi dongle. MIPI DSI framework and BOE panel driver are a longer-term collaboration with the FreeBSD DRM/graphics community.

Essential developer resources

Conclusion (verbatim)

The PinePhone Pro FreeBSD port is real, active, and usable for development — it boots to a touchscreen desktop today. USB and WiFi are the critical barriers to daily-driver use. The PineTab2 port is feasible because the RK3566 SoC already has working FreeBSD drivers via the Quartz64 platform, and the device tree is in mainline Linux. The two hardest PineTab2-specific problems are the MIPI DSI display (no FreeBSD framework exists) and the BES2600 WiFi (barely functional even on Linux). The pragmatic path is: use the PinePhone Pro for FreeBSD mobile development now, contribute USB and WiFi fixes that benefit both devices, then bring up the PineTab2 headless via HDMI using the Quartz64 foundation.

— PORTING_RESEARCH.md, conclusion. This was the plan, and it is broadly the path the project has followed.