Overview

The Manjaro distribution, but for ARM devices.

Based on Arch Linux ARM, combined with Manjaro tools, themes and infrastructure to make install images for your ARM device, like the Pinebook and Raspberry Pi.

Installation

Preparing the SPI (optional)

Some boards have an SPI storage chip. This is a small storage device, usually 4-16 MB in size, that the board checks for firmware before proceeding to other devices. So we can utilize this chip, by preparing the board specific firmware on it, making it able to boot our generic image.
We have currently tested Tow-Boot, so that's what this guide will use.

Go to the latest release section of Tow-Boot and download the file that matches your board. This is important.
Unpack it and flash the `spi.installer.img` file to a spare SD card. If the archive does not contain any spi.installer.img file for your board, you should use one of our pre-built OS images instead, which has the Shared Storage version of U-boot installed.
Insert the SD card into your device and boot from it. You will be presented with a short menu. One entry is "Flash Tow-Boot to SPI", second entry is "Erase SPI Flash" and the last option is "Reboot".
Select the "Flash Tow-Boot to SPI" option and wait until it finishes successfully. It can take a couple of minutes as SPI storage is rather slow.
When it's done, power off the device and take out the SD card. Now your device has the Tow-Boot board firmware in place and should now be capable of booting any generic aarch64 image that supports your board.

Our Generic Aarch64 image supports the Extlinux booting scheme so far.

Downloading

You can find installation images in the downloads section of the Manjaro Website.
Find the image that matches your target device and desired edition.
Or if you have Board Firmware on your SPI, you can try our new Generic Aarch64 images.

Writing the Installation Media

The images are in a .xz file. These files can be burned directly to an SD card with Etcher or with dd directly.
To manually install to your SD card with dd:

Extract the image.

unxz Manjaro-ARM-[Edition]-[Device]-[Version].xz

Get it on the SD card

sudo dd if=Manjaro-ARM-[Edition]-[Device]-[Version].img of=/dev/[device] bs=4M

Where [device] is your SD card's device, as seen by lsblk. Usually mmcblk0 or sdb.

Cleanup and First Boot

Once you have the image on the SDCard, you should be able to put the card into your device and plug it in. If everything worked correctly, it should boot to the OEM setup. Here you define your username, passwords locales etc. Once that is done, the script will clean up after itself, resize the partition and reboot the device. After that reboot, it should boot to the Operating System. Depending on the edition you have installed, this could be a simple TTY login or a graphical desktop environment.

Resizing the partitions

Since 18.09 this is now done automatically. The device will boot to OEM setup, which will handle the resizing, and then reboot before the login screen would appear. When it's booted to the login screen, the filesystem has been resized to fill out the remaining space on the SD card.

Login

Login depends on what you set up during the OEM setup. There are 1 users by default on the image. root. And by default it has no password and autologin enabled. This gets changed when the OEM script is run, to disable the autologin and set the password defined during the setup.

Supported Devices

Hardkernel

	Hardkernel
Model	Odroid-C2	Odroid-C4	Odroid-N2	Odroid-N2+	Odroid-M1
Release Year	2016	2020	2019	2020	2021
SoC Manufacturer	Amlogic	Amlogic	Amlogic	Amlogic	Rockchip
Lithography	28nm	12nm	12nm	12nm	22nm
CPU	S905	S905X3	S922X	S922X	RK3568B2
CPU Topology	Quad-core: 4 x Cortex-A53	Quad-core: 4 x Cortex-A55	Hexa-core: 4 x Cortex-A73 2 x Cortex-A53	Hexa-core: 4 x Cortex-A73 2 x Cortex-A53	Quad-core: 4 x Cortex-A55
CPU Frequency	4 x 1.5GHz	4 x 2.0GHz	4 x 2.0GHz 2 x 1.8GHz	4 x 2.4GHz 2 x 1.9GHz	4 x 2.0GHz
GPU	Mali-450 MP3	Mali-G31 MP2	Mali-G52 MP4	Mali-G52 MP4	Mali-G52 2EE MC2
Memory	2GB DDR3	4GB DDR4	2–4GB DDR4	2–4GB DDR4	4–8GB LPDDR4
Generic image support	No	No	Yes	Yes	No

Khadas

	Khadas
Model	Edge-V	Vim 1	Vim 2	Vim 3
Release Year	2018	2016	2017	2019
SoC Manufacturer	Rockchip	Amlogic	Amlogic	Amlogic
Lithography	28nm	28nm	28nm	12nm
CPU	RK3399	S905X	S912	A311D
CPU Topology	Hexa-core: 2 x Cortex-A72 4 x Cortex-A53	Quad-core: 4 x Cortex-A53	Octa-core: 8 x Cortex-A53	Hexa-core: 4 x Cortex-A73 2 x Cortex-A53
CPU Frequency	2 x 1.8GHz 4 x 1.5GHz	4 x 1.5GHz	8 x 1.5GHz	4 x 2.2GHz 2 x 1.8GHz
GPU	Mali-T860 MP4	Mali-450 MP3	Mali-T820 MP3	Mali-G52 MP4
Memory	2–4GB LPDDR4	2GB DDR3	2–3GB LPDDR4	2–4GB LPDDR4
Generic image support	No	No	No	No

Pine64

	Pine64
Model	Rock64	RockPro64	Pine H64	Pinebook	Pinebook Pro	PinePhone	PinePhone Pro	Quartz64
Release Year	2017	2017	2019	2017	2019	2019	2022	2021
SoC Manufacturer	Rockchip	Rockchip	Allwinner	Allwinner	Rockchip	Allwinner	Rockchip	Rockchip
Lithography	28nm	28nm	28nm	40nm	28nm	40nm	28nm	22nm
CPU	RK3328	RK3399	H6	A64	RK3399	A64	RK3399S	RK3566
CPU Topology	Quad-core: 4 x Cortex-A53	Hexa-core: 2 x Cortex-A72 4 x Cortex-A53	Quad-core: 4 x Cortex-A53	Quad-core: 4 x Cortex-A53	Hexa-core: 2 x Cortex-A72 4 x Cortex-A53	Quad-core: 4 x Cortex-A53	Hexa-core: 2 x Cortex-A72 4 x Cortex-A53	Quad-core: 4 x Cortex-A55
CPU Frequency	4 x 1.5GHz	2 x 2.0GHz 4 x 1.5GHz	4 x 1.8GHz	4 x 1.152GHz	2 x 2.0GHz 4 x 1.5GHz	4 x 1.2GHz	2 x 1.5GHz 4 x 1.5GHz	4 x 1.8GHz
GPU	Mali-450 MP2	Mali-T860 MP4	Mali-T720 MP2	Mali-400 MP2	Mali-T860 MP4	Mali-400 MP2	Mali-T860 MP4	Mali-G52 2EE
Memory	1–4GB LPDDR3	2–4GB LPDDR4	2–4GB LPDDR3	2GB LPDDR3	4GB LPDDR4	2–3GB LPDDR3	4GB LPDDR4 @800 MHz	4–8GB LPDDR4
Generic image support	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	No

Radxa

	Radxa
Model	Rock Pi 4	Radxa Zero
Release Year	2019	2021
SoC Manufacturer	Rockchip	Amlogic
Lithography	28nm	12nm
CPU	RK3399	S905Y2
CPU Topology	Hexa-core: 2 x Cortex-A72 4 x Cortex-A53	Quad-core: 4 x Cortex-A53
CPU Frequency	2 x 2.0GHz 4 x 1.5GHz	4 x 1.8GHz
GPU	Mali-T860 MP4	Mali-G31 MP2
Memory	1–4GB LPDDR4	1–4GB LPDDR4
Generic image support	Yes	No

Raspberry

	Raspberry
Model	Pi 3B	Pi 3B+	Pi 4B	Pi 400
Release Year	2016	2018	2019	2020
SoC Manufacturer	Broadcom	Broadcom	Broadcom	Broadcom
Lithography	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm
CPU	BCM2837	BCM2837B0	BCM2711	BCM2711
CPU Topology	Quad-core: 4 x Cortex-A53	Quad-core: 4 x Cortex-A53	Quad-core: 4 x Cortex-A72	Quad-core: 4 x Cortex-A72
CPU Frequency	4 x 1.2GHz	4 x 1.4GHz	4 x 1.5GHz	4 x 1.5GHz
GPU	VideoCore IV	VideoCore IV	VideoCore VI	VideoCore VI
Memory	1GB LPDDR2	1GB LPDDR2	1–8GB LPDDR4	4GB LPDDR4
Generic image support	No	No	No	No

Raspberry Pi

Sensors

For temperature and humidity sensor see this tutorial on the forums: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/howto-raspberry-pi-temperature-and-humidity-sensor-dht22-dht11-am2302/34685

Overclocking

You can manage voltage and frequency settings in your /boot/config.txt. The following are the most common values for the Raspberry Pi:

 over_voltage=6
 arm_freq=2100
 gpu_freq=650

Troubleshooting

Pi 400 Power Button

If you have trouble using the power button on your Pi 400 with the XFCE desktop (or xfce4-power-manager) then make sure logind is handling button events:

xfconf-query -c xfce4-power-manager -p /xfce4-power-manager/logind-handle-power-key -n -t bool -s true

Blocked Update

There are device-dependent workarounds if you experience an error similar to:

error: failed to prepare transaction (conflicting dependencies)
:: brcm-patchram-plus and pi-bluetooth are in conflict

For the Pi 3B:

sudo systemctl disable brcm43438.service
sudo pacman -S -dd  brcm-patchram-plus-pi3b firmware-raspberrypi
sudo systemctl enable attach-bluetooth-pi3.service

For the Pi 3B+:

sudo systemctl disable brcm43438.service
sudo pacman -S -dd  brcm-patchram-plus firmware-raspberrypi
sudo systemctl enable attach-bluetooth.service

For the Pi 4B:

sudo systemctl disable brcm43438.service
sudo pacman -S -dd  brcm-patchram-plus firmware-raspberrypi
sudo systemctl enable attach-bluetooth.service

For the Pi 400:

sudo systemctl disable brcm43438.service
sudo pacman -S -dd  brcm-patchram-plus-pi400 firmware-raspberrypi
sudo systemctl enable attach-bluetooth-pi400.service

Missing Bluetooth after raspberrypi-bootloader/-x update 20210208-1

First, check whether the bootloader has been updated:

pacman -Ss raspberrypi-bootloader

Possible results:

core/raspberrypi-bootloader 20210208-1 [installed]
   Bootloader files for Raspberry Pi
core/raspberrypi-bootloader-x 20210208-1 [installed]
   Bootloader with extra codecs for Raspberry Pi

If it is the case, changing the occurrences of ttyAMA0 in /boot/cmdline.txt to serial0 may fix missing Bluetooth (Source).

Android TV boxes

With a couple of small tweaks it is possible to boot and install the vim3 builds of Manjaro on some Amlogic TV boxes. Running Manjaro on TV boxes is not recommended for less experienced users of Linux nor serious production use.

Unsupported Devices

In general, any device that does not have a device specific image or works with the Generic image, is considered unsupported. We may drop support for a device when the manufacturer no longer sells the device. The device is then considered EOL (End-Of-Life). Such a device might still work by updating and old image or running the Generic image, but we no longer work to keep it working.

Manjaro-ARM

Contents