QNAP TS-433

Resources

The QNAP TS-433-4G is a Rockchip RK3568 (ARMv8-A, Cortex-A55) based NAS. Because of the great work of Heiko Stübner, there is from kernel version 6.14 upstream support for this SoC. Makes for a great NAS with 4x 3.5" HDD slots.

Easiest way to install Gentoo on the system, is to prepare a USB device you can boot from, and then use that to install Gentoo on the eMMC itself. You should have a serial cable and confirm that it works before beginning. See the instructions on u-boot

With the serial cable working, you can gain access to the preinstalled Linux image provided by QNAP. I suggest using this to make a full image backup of the whole eMMC by doing dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M | ssh somewhere dd of=backup.img bs=1M

Installing the bootloader

Rockchip uses GPT as its partition scheme, and embeds u-boot before the first partition. So remember to leave some room at the beginning when creating your partitions.

Follow the guide from u-boot to build and install u-boot for the device.

Do note that this board does not like all 5V to TTL 3.3V-adapters out there. If you want to make sure you will get a working serial console, try this cable: https://ftdichip.com/products/ttl-232r-3v3/ (don't connect VCC).

Installing Gentoo

After installing your own u-boot at the beginning on the eMMC, you should know that u-boot looks after /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf or /extlinux/extlinux.conf on the first partition it sees (formatted with ext4). This will work both from USB and from eMMC. The system will not boot QNAP OS when you update u-boot, so the easiest way is just providing a usb drive with a working boot and root partition.

Example partition layout:

root #

# gdisk -l /dev/mmcblk0
GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 1.0.10
Partition table scan:

 MBR: protective
 BSD: not present
 APM: not present
 GPT: present

Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT.
Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 7733248 sectors, 3.7 GiB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512/512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): B0ABD73E-F302-449B-88FF-C4A53275B1F1
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
Main partition table begins at sector 2 and ends at sector 33
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 7733214
Partitions will be aligned on 2048-sector boundaries
Total free space is 34749 sectors (17.0 MiB)
Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name

  1           32768          573439   264.0 MiB   8300  uboot
  2          573440         7731199   3.4 GiB     8305  Linux ARM64 root (/)

Kernel sources with patches for TS-433 (from 6.14 you can use upstream): https://github.com/mmind/linux-rockchip/commits/dev/qnap-ts433/mainline/

With an arm64 compiler chain, do: make qnap-ts433_defconfig and make -j4 && make modules_install (and get the modules to the target filesystem, of course.)

/boot (mmcblk0p1 (GPT) or USB partition 1 (GPT), ext4) should contain these files:

rk3568-qnap-ts433.dtb (from arch/arm64/boot/dts)
Image (from arch/arm64/boot)
extlinux/extlinux.conf
and a boot -> . symlink (ln -s boot . in /boot)

FILE /boot/extlinux/extlinux.confextlinux.conf example

label gentoo
    kernel /boot/Image
    fdt /boot/rk3568-qnap-ts433.dtb
    append earlycon=uart8250,mmio32,0xfe660000 console=tty1 console=ttyS2,115200n8 rw root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootwait init=/sbin/init

Partition 2 could be a normal stage3 arm64, works just fine out of the box.