[feat]: RockPro64 support

[PLK2]

Prerequisites

• I have searched for existing issues that already suggest this feature, without success.

Describe the Feature Request

Support installation of Embassy on RockPro64.

Describe the Use Case

In my personal experience, the RockPro64 is substantially more stable than the Raspberry Pi. One key benefit is the PCIe board, allowing you to bypass USB issues.
Another benefit: board availability. Difficult to procure Pis at the moment.
Umbrel now supports all Ubuntu/Debian installs.

Describe Preferred Solution

No response

Describe Alternatives

No response

Anything else?

No response

[kn0wmad]

We have investigated this, and certainly intend to support a much wider array of hardware in the (near) future. That being said, when we say we "support" a device, that means we truly provide support, from a human, to our customers. This means that we extensively test our builds on supported hardware. It is already possible to hack together a build to work on any ARM-based system, and we encourage you to do so, but we do not officially support it. To our knowledge, Umbrel has added the 'ability' to install to any Debian-based hardware, but do not actually provide support for those systems.

I'm leaving this open for now for the tracking of RockPro support.

[PLK2]

Ah, thanks for the clarification on "support."
I searched for how to hack Embassy to work with RockPro64 but came up short. Could you possibly point me in a direction? I'm not sure where I would even start (novice, here).

[kn0wmad]

You would need to change the base image in the build process. This is all found in the build folder, but again, is unsupported. Let us know if you get it running and I will happily do some testing with your change. You may also like to join our Community Dev channel on Matrix (https://matrix.to/#/#community-dev:matrix.start9labs.com) to share your experience and see if anyone else has attempted with a rockpro build.

[PLK2]

Thank you!!

[chrisguida]

Anyone is welcome to try this, but it would be a bit of a project. You'd most likely need to change the base OS from raspios to something else, though it's theoretically possible raspios would run on a rockpro. I don't know since I've never had a rockpro. But it's arm64, and also low-resource, so the changes should be minimal. There are a few components of embassy-os that are pi-specific, such as the sound module, so that would need to be changed if you wanted the speaker to work, assuming speakers are a thing on the rockpro, and assuming it has a pwm module.

[elvece]

TODO create build of eOS for arm64 / grub base