Mixtile OS

Mixtile OS is the official operating system for Edge 2: Ubuntu or Debian, set up for the board, with the GPU, the video codecs and the NPU working out of the box.

Editions

Distribution	Editions
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS	Server, Desktop (GNOME)
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS	Server, Desktop (GNOME)
Debian 13	Server, Desktop (GNOME)
Debian 12	Server, Desktop (GNOME)

The desktop edition starts GNOME on the HDMI monitor. The server edition has no graphical session and is used over SSH or the serial console. For help choosing, see Downloads.

Login details

Item	Value
User	mixtile
Password	mixtile
Hostname	mixtile-edge2
Serial console	1500000 baud, on the debug UART

You can log in on the HDMI monitor, the serial console or over SSH. On the desktop edition, mixtile is logged in to GNOME automatically. Change the password with passwd after the first login.

The mixtile user can use sudo, and is a member of the dialout group, so it can open the serial ports without sudo.

Networking

Networking is managed by NetworkManager.

• Ethernet gets its address by DHCP as soon as a cable is connected. The Ethernet interface is named end1.

• Wi-Fi: connect two Wi-Fi antennas to the antenna connectors on the bottom side of the board, then connect with nmcli on the server edition, or in Settings on the desktop edition:

  Edge 2

  nmcli device wifi list
  sudo nmcli device wifi connect "<network-name>" password "<password>"

• Bluetooth: the Bluetooth controller is available as hci0. The server edition does not include the Bluetooth tools, such as bluetoothctl.

note

Connecting to a Wi-Fi network and using Bluetooth devices have not yet been verified on Edge 2.

What works out of the box

• 3D graphics on the Mali GPU, with OpenGL and Vulkan through Mesa, in the desktop edition
• Hardware video decoding and encoding, used by the included FFmpeg and GStreamer
• Hardware 2D acceleration
• NPU inference, for the example under Application Development

Hardware Interfaces in Mixtile OS

This is how Mixtile OS exposes the interfaces of Edge 2. For the connectors themselves, see Hardware Usage.

Interface	In Mixtile OS
Debug UART	Serial console with a login prompt, at 1500000 baud
UART3 and UART5	/dev/ttyS3 and /dev/ttyS5
RS-485 (UART4)	/dev/ttyS4
I²C connector (I2C3)	/dev/i2c-3
ADC connector	in_voltage4_raw to in_voltage7_raw under /sys/bus/iio/devices/iio:device0/. A raw value of 1023 corresponds to 1.8 V.
IR connector	IR remote-control receiver for NEC-format remotes; key presses arrive as input events from fe6e0030.pwm
M.2 socket	Both PCIe lanes are used for PCIe. Routing the second lane to USB 3.0 is not offered.
CAN	Not available. The kernel does not include a driver for the RK3568 CAN controller, so no CAN network interface appears.
eDP, MIPI-DSI, MIPI-CSI	Not enabled in the device tree. Only the HDMI output is used. To use a panel or camera, add it to the kernel device tree and rebuild the image, see Building a Mixtile OS Image.
U.2	SATA, PCIe 2.0 and GMAC0 are not enabled in the device tree
S/PDIF and digital microphone	Not enabled
RECOVERY button	Not used
System LED	Blinks in a heartbeat pattern

To list the devices on the I²C bus, install i2c-tools and run sudo i2cdetect -y 3. The on-board real-time clock answers at address 0x51.

Devices connected to these interfaces have not yet been tested with Mixtile OS.

Real-Time Clocks

Mixtile OS registers two real-time clocks:

Device	Clock	Kept without power	Used at startup
/dev/rtc0	RTC of the RK809 power-management chip	No	Yes
/dev/rtc1	HYM8563, with the coin cell	Yes	No

At startup, Mixtile OS sets the system time from /dev/rtc0, which does not keep the time while the board has no power. Once the board is on the network, the system time is corrected over NTP. The HYM8563 is not read automatically, so without a network connection the system time is wrong after a power cycle.

To check which device is which:

Edge 2

grep . /sys/class/rtc/rtc*/name

Expected result:

/sys/class/rtc/rtc0/name:rk808-rtc rk817-rtc
/sys/class/rtc/rtc1/name:rtc-hym8563 3-0051

Read the HYM8563:

Edge 2

sudo hwclock -r -f /dev/rtc1

When the system time is correct, for example after it has synchronized over the network, write it to the HYM8563:

Edge 2

sudo hwclock -w -f /dev/rtc1

To set the system time from the HYM8563, for example on a board without a network connection:

Edge 2

sudo hwclock -s -f /dev/rtc1

note

Writing to the HYM8563 and setting the system time from it have not yet been verified on Edge 2.

Building it yourself

The image sources are public. See Building a Mixtile OS Image.