OpenWrt

Overview

Mixtile builds OpenWrt for Blade 3 from the official OpenWrt releases, with the Blade 3 device tree and U-Boot added. The build is published in the mixtile-rockchip/openwrt repository. Blade 3 is not a target of the official OpenWrt project.

warning

Hardware support has not been fully verified on Blade 3. Test the interfaces you need before you rely on the system.

Download

The current release is mixtile-v25.12.4, based on OpenWrt 25.12.4. Download one of the two Blade 3 images:

Image	File system
openwrt-rockchip-armv8-mixtile_blade3-squashfs-sysupgrade.img.gz	Read-only system with a writable overlay. Supports factory reset.
openwrt-rockchip-armv8-mixtile_blade3-ext4-sysupgrade.img.gz	Writable file system, for development.

Releases based on OpenWrt 24.10 are on the releases page.

Install

Each file is a complete disk image, with U-Boot included, compressed with gzip. Extract the .img file, then write it to the eMMC as described in Flashing an OS Image.

This procedure has not yet been verified with the OpenWrt images.

First Boot

In the Blade 3 board configuration, eth1 is the LAN interface and eth0 is the WAN interface. OpenWrt's default LAN address is 192.168.1.1. Connect a computer to the LAN port and log in as described in OpenWrt's first login guide.

The serial console is also available on the debug UART, at 1500000 baud.

Build from Source

The release images above are built from the same source, so you only need to build OpenWrt yourself to change its configuration or packages.

These steps follow the build configuration and CI of the repository. They have not been tested as written here.

Prerequisites

An x86_64 computer running Ubuntu or Debian, on a case-sensitive file system. Install the build dependencies:

Host PC

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y build-essential ccache file flex g++ gawk gcc-multilib gettext git \
    libncurses-dev libssl-dev python3 python3-pyelftools python3-setuptools rsync subversion \
    swig unzip wget zlib1g-dev

Get the source

The main branch tracks upstream OpenWrt. Mixtile product support is maintained in branches based on OpenWrt release series. The openwrt-25.12 branch is based on OpenWrt 25.12 and includes Mixtile Blade 3 support; the current release, mixtile-v25.12.4, is built from it.

Host PC

git clone -b openwrt-25.12 https://github.com/mixtile-rockchip/openwrt.git
cd openwrt
./scripts/feeds update -a
./scripts/feeds install -a

To build the source of a specific release, check out its tag, for example git checkout mixtile-v25.12.4.

Configure the Blade 3 build

The repository includes a configuration that selects Blade 3:

Host PC

cp configs/mixtile-blade3-25.12.config .config
make defconfig

It selects Target System Rockchip, Subtarget RK33xx/RK35xx boards (64 bit) and Target Profile Mixtile Blade3. To add packages or change other options, run make menuconfig afterwards.

The release images also include every kernel module package. To match them, run echo CONFIG_ALL_KMODS=y >> .config before make defconfig.

Build

Host PC

make download -j$(nproc)
make -j$(nproc)

If the build fails, run make -j1 V=s to see the error.

Build output

The images are written to bin/targets/rockchip/armv8/, with the same names as the release files:

openwrt-rockchip-armv8-mixtile_blade3-squashfs-sysupgrade.img.gz
openwrt-rockchip-armv8-mixtile_blade3-ext4-sysupgrade.img.gz

Install one of them as described in Install. For more about the OpenWrt build system, see the OpenWrt developer documentation.

Known Limitations

• Which Ethernet jack is eth0 and which is eth1 has not been documented.
• The image includes no Wi-Fi packages.
• Ethernet, storage, USB, HDMI and other interfaces have not been verified on Blade 3.