It said "archlinux" because I took something from my notes for my Arch Linux images. It was only an example command and you can put there anything on how you named the image. I did not include image creating and bootrapping an OS into the image. I mainly wanted to show you how you can build and flash your custom u-boot. You get these "idbloader.img" and "u-boot.itb" files from the steps I laid out. If you download u-boot, bl31, ddr and compile it, you will see the files in the folder. I am sure you will understand this pretty fast. :-) Create an empty img file Create a rootfs partition (should start at 16MB) Bootstrap Debian or Ubuntu into the image Then start with the u-boot stuff above. By the time 6.19 drops, you will be a master in building images. :-)

yes. I tried r8125-9.016.01 but with mixed results. Ethernet addresses could not be read by the new driver. And PHC support was no longer shown after reboot.

The thing is that no file is present under /boot. It's true for some other folders (I can't check rn) but the /home folder is fine. It's not a missing permission problem, `sudo ls /boot` yields the same result. I'll get back at you when I can check but this seemed to be happening on 2 different computer. I just assumed that /boot is meant to be empty and gets populated at boot (and it was just strange design), since I can't see any content in /boot when mounting the sd card externally even when the box boots fine. From inside the box when it boots fine I can access the content of /boot though. I'll try to get my hands on a serial to usb cable, though this will just help to figure out why it doesn't boot, not why I can't access the content on the sd card externally.

If it is bootable, it is supposed to boot from it. The default u-boot boots first from SD, then eMMC, then SATA.

From a quick research it seems mainline driver does not support this. You need to install out of band driver from realtek