Rock3 - a very capable router board

This is the $35 SBC, Rock3 from Radxa. 

ROCK3 features a quad core Cortex-A55 ARM processor, 32bit 3200Mb/s LPDDR4, with a 2-lane PCI-e 3.0  m.2 M key  and and a PCI-e 2.0  E key slot,  a gig Ethernet port and a  host of other interfaces.

 

The PCI-e 3.0 , 2x port is capable of 650MB/sec write speed on a PCI 3.0 nvme device. A quick check as a nas / gitea server reveled the processor maxing out on ssh/git process, ending up around 30 MB/s write speed. Nevertheless this kit is the prime candidate for the edge router.

The second ethernet device from aliexpress will go on pci-e 3.0 interface. The initial testing using a standard RTL8111 PCI network card  sustained a throughput of 940Mbit/s.

An Atheros QCNFA222 is used as the 2.4 G access point device for initial tests. Atheros devices  always proven to be rock solid and the widest interoperabilty

Software

Radxa's kernel comes from rockchip bsp (4.19.193) - RK3568 support  has just landed upstream 5.16 - with only one dts; Hopefully the rock3 will follow soon.

The initial build is based  on  Radxa wiki . The u-boot build creates :

292864 Dec 25 19:10 idbloader.img

440768 Dec 25 19:10 rk356x_spl_loader_ddr1056_v1.06.110.bin

4194304 Dec 25 19:07 trust.img

4194304 Dec 25 19:07 uboot.img

1402368 Dec 25 19:10 u-boot.itb 

The relationship of each item is explained in this image from Rockchip :

Our boot process follows boot flow 2, hence we need to :

dd the idbloader.img to the SD card at 0x40 (seek 64)

u-boot.itb goes to 0x4000 (seek 16384)

The GPT layout of the disk starts from sector 32768 (0x8000); The u-boot environment can be squeezed at 0x6000. 

The rk36x..bin file is for the rkdeveloper tool use (maskrom mode) (top left path)

Wireguard performance:

.. and here is how good this board is .. 

 

iperf between an i7 host and this board via a gigabit lan ... 821Mbits/sec !!!!