Pinebook Pro no longer WIP

[Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org>]

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Someone pointed to me various patches[0][1] and kernel module
selections[2] related to the Pinebook Pro that lead to me feeling
confident to merge some kernel and u-boot changes for the Pinebook Pro
into guix/master...

Which now means that you should be able to run Guix System on a Pinebook
Pro without too much trouble, even using the bootloader form the
keyboard and screen rather than serial console.


Things I've tested that work:

  eDP panel (a.k.a. the monitor)
  keyboard
  trackpad
  microSD
  basic battery and charger monitoring
  USB ports (ethernet, keyboard)
  Sufficient graphics acceleration to run "sway"
  Pinebook Pro USB-C dock (ethernet, USB 3.0 ports, USB-C ports, microSD reader)
  cpu frequency scalining

Untested:

  NVMe adapter (no pcie bus detected, needs further investigation)
  eMMC
  WiFi (non-free drivers)
  suspend in any form

Outstanding bugs and/or quirks:

  often hangs on reboot and keeps draining power
  sometimes hangs on shutdown and keeps draining power
  charging from usb-c only works sometimes
  usb-c dock ethernet/usb-3 only works with the usb-c plug in the "correct" orientation

Further exploration:

I've only tested with the "linux-libre-arm64-generic" kernels, but in
theory if the right modules are enabled and you add them to your initrd,
the regular "linux-libre" package should work as well.

There's one patch in wip-pinebook-pro still that included a system
configuration for the pinebook pro; it may need some slight updating to
be brought current. Other than that, it is probably time to completely
deprecate and/or remove the wip-pinebook-pro branch!

I also haven't ever played with the disk-image that's merged in guix
master, but in theory these improvments should make it work better!


In closing, it's a somewhat usable, quirky laptop running aarch64!

Big thanks to janneke for the initial work on the wip-pinebook-pro
branch, Lionel Fourquaux for bringing the minimal changes needed to my
attention, and everyone else who's helped along the way.


live well,
  vagrant

[0] https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/project/uboot/patch/20210406151059.1187379-1-icenowy@aosc.io/
[1] https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-rockchip/patch/20200924063042.41545-1-jhp@endlessos.org/
[2] https://bugs.debian.org/987638

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