Arch Linux ARM on the Allwinner NanoPi A64

Arch Linux ARM on a NanoPi A64

I've obtained two NanoPi A64's a long while ago and recently thought of setting them up as a HA cluster as an exercise. Since setting it up with real hardware is a lot more fun then with VM's or containers. And I wanted to try out aarch64 and see how well that fares on mainline Linux.

The first part of setting it up created the partitions and rootfs on the sd card. For this I've just followed the "Generic AArch64 Installation". The more challenging part was setting up U-boot, clone it and follow the 64 bit board instructions. All that is required now is to install a boot.scr file in /boot on the sdcard, download the boot.cmd file and create a boot.scr with mkimage from uboot-tools with mkimage -C none -A arm64 -T script -d boot.cmd boot.scr.

That should get the NanoPi A64 booting, note that 4.20 is required for the ethernet controller to work, luckily Arch Linux ARM offers an linux-rc package since as of writing this article 4.20 is still not released yet.