A brief summary about Android on Rockchip devices (Part 1: Boot partition)

I’ve worked with many Android devices but Rockchip is something that has impressed me the most.

1. Kernel

If you’ve worked with Rockchip, you will obviously know that Rockchip’s kernel can use across devices running the same chipset. For example, if you have a RK3368 device and want to run on another device running same chip, just go ahead and try it out. Over 80% it will work. With 20% it will not work as different kernel structure.

Boot partition often divided into 3 section:

Kernel

Resource

Ramdisk

We always see the combined form of boot partition as boot.img but when playing around with Rockchip, you must be careful as the boot partition on Rockchip devices only contain the ramdisk.

The resource partition contains two part, one for the bootlogo (before Android boot animation) and one for dtb. In the next section, we will break down how the boot section actually boots.

If you want to take a look at Rockchip kernel, you can find it here: https://github.com/rockchip-linux/kernel