Quartz64 development

Since the beginning of July 2021, Manjaro ARM has booted on the Quartz64 from Pine64. We have been using the kernel source from Peter Geis (pgwipeout), which is where Peter upstreams all the stuff from. So it has been working really well.

In the end of July 2021, we managed to patch our linux-rc kernel package (version 5.14 at the time) enough, to get the Quartz64 to boot using that kernel. We did this by applying around 10 patches, that was submitted to the kernel mailing list, but did not make it into the 5.14 or 5.15 release cycles.

And in the beginning of January 2022, we finally managed to package and boot a mainline uboot, based on Peter Geis' mainline uboot branch.
This uboot package is based on mainline uboot, but still requires blobs from Rockchip, because Rockchip still has not supplied it's sources to Trusted Firmware - ARM.

It is now our great pleasure, to announce that the Quartz64 Model A and B boards will be using our main linux package by default, once 5.19.0 is released. It's still using a good amount of patches though, but hopefully most of those go away with the 5.20 kernel.

Some things are still not working though. These things include, but are not limited to:

• E-Ink display (Needs a reverse engineered e-ink driver)
• And of course the always elusive Hardware Accelerated Video Decoding

I can't wait to see how the 5.20 RC kernels are gonna be and see how many patches we can remove, because they are upstream.