Looks like people are most active for Orange Pi i96 here, so although I’ve personally given up on the board due to its bugginess, I hope a few things I’ve found along the way may be helpful to others:
- ALSA restore issues: it seems to be buggy firmware on the XCPU side of things causing something to hang. The code is pretty complex so I never really found out what’s up with it, but I did make a patch on the kernel side that should help prevent invalid params from being sent over to the other side. https://github.com/orangepi-xunlong/OrangePiRDA_kernel/pull/2
- Buggy UART: copy and pasting tended to hang the console. This was caused by not resetting the overflow flag on UART. https://github.com/orangepi-xunlong/OrangePiRDA_kernel/pull/3
- Retaining WiFi MAC address: it looks like people have done various hacks of their own to try to get it working, but there is an actual proper way if you’re using RDA’s U-Boot and kernel drivers. Copy and pasted from #3 of aib/opi2g-utils on GitHub:
The reason the MAC address keeps on changing is you’re missing the NVRAM (
factorydata) partition. Add in a 2MBfactorydatapartition to yourmtdparts, reflash, and after the system boots, reboot and a randomly generated MAC address will be written into the NVRAM partition (important that you reboot, because the NVRAM is only written in U-Boot), which the WiFi driver can retrieve in subsequent boots. For SD card installations, shrink the rootfs and add a 2MB partition at the end, and make sure to set the GPT partition name tofactorydataso U-Boot can find it.There’s also a prdinfo partition (
misc), but it’s not too important.
