jock

Armbian already offers ways to customize the final image, it is used by SBC manufacturers to build their own images, for examples. Don't understand why you should want to customize the boot process though, which is quite delicate thing. If would be nice, since you got so many of them, if you open the box and make detailed photos of the boards. And it would be even nicer to have samples of those boards that "don't boot" and those which give no video signal in my lab, since those issues are very niche cases and incredibly difficult to debug without the hardware. There are a plethora of reasons they could not boot, there are at least 4 different pieces of software chained one after another during the boot, not just the kernel. The serial adapter is essential to debug. About the missing boot, as said, it is a very delicate thing and requires good knowledge about each piece in the equation (ddrbin, trust os, miniloader/uboot SPL, uboot, the device trees, the kernel drivers, ...). You can't just swap the kernel and expect it magically works; and that's one of the reasons armbian exists: to ease the pain to boot SBCs and - as side effect - tv boxes. Sorry to stress this thing, but never worked there because you did not read carefully the first post. There's a paragraph on booting from sdcard. And did you note you could also boot from USB stick/HDD ? What are you confused about? Which pass of the step-by-step guide is not clear? They are the lowest end product available on the market, yet TX9 means nothing. Chinese manufactures give them fantasy names no matter what's inside the box, that's the reason we always talk about the boards, trying to identify them by looking at the signature and markings on the PCB.

Nope, every board and every memory chip have their flaws, so you have to take your chances. Why? Of course not. Perhaps you may need to increase the vdd_log voltage, which drives the memory controller, but don't expect great results... As you see, the board does not even arrive at booting the kernel when the wrong frequency is chosen, so the problem here is before the kernel takes control when tinkering with boot frequencies. What I have seen is that, when the memory controller driver is engaged, it is perfectly able to reach 800Mhz on board that can't even boot at 660Mhz, so something is still missing in the equation.

@ANKH Ok, the logs report that led-conf5 (no alt) is actually doing something because the device mmc4 spawns up, tries to get probed, but an error occurs. Try this other device tree overlay: I gave more strength to sdio pins, according to the original device tree. Again, the feedback with logs is useful (even if the wifi works)! rockchip-rk3318-box-led-conf5.dtbo

That's mostly because the cheapest models are usually chinese crap where costs are cut as much as possible, and you get no warranty of any kind. These are toys that at most cost 3$ of materials to manufacturers and they sell them at 25$ and, for 90% of people, they are cheap trash that sometimes work, sometimes don't.

@art3mis_17 @fabiobassa is totally right, you will need a working sd adapter because you have a NAND chip and not an eMMC chip; I just add a quick note: you must use the image with legacy kernel if you want to install to NAND. Refer to the first page for detailed instructions.

@ANKH I set up a couple of device tree overlays that you may wish to try. Try first the led-conf5 overlay, if it does not work try the led-conf5-alt overlay. Put the files in /boot/dtb/rockchip/overlay directory and then modify /boot/armbianEnv.txt to enable led-conf5/led-conf5-alt. Please post a dmesg output or, even better, the URL given by armbianmonitor -u rockchip-rk3318-box-led-conf5-alt.dtbo rockchip-rk3318-box-led-conf5.dtbo

Your goal is achieved already, since armbian already runs on those boxes, or do i miss something? Did you inspect the hardware? Did you connect a serial adapter to debug the output from the serial port? Have you read carefully and throughly the first post of this thread? Perhaps you have different boards or boards with different hardware, despite the commercial name. Multitool does not only work with old kernel version, it is made this way on purpose, to be the most compatible with the plethora of devices around; also NAND boards work only on legacy 4.4 kernel. I don't understand what you mean with "eMMC image"; there is no limitation about the storage device for armbian images (read the first post) Read the first post. Even better, this thread is filled with useful info you may need. May I ask how your university got all those cheap and trashy devices and what is the final purpose of altering their firmware? But it's okay if you don't want to share!

@ANKH According to your dtb, your board is similar to MXQ-RK3328-D4_A (led-conf3), but also has a different power-on GPIO pin for wireless, and that's probably the reason the wifi chip is not detected at all. In general, the power-on GPIO is wired to bank #1 pin 18, but on your board it is wired to GPIO bank #3 pin 8. It requires an adaptation of the device tree or a new overlay to properly support your specific board.

@Energokom good for you; by the way the operating points defined by rockchip are not the exact frequency of the ddr chips, but somehow they are just a bit below: 330 mhz, 528 mhz, 660 mhz are usually used in the device trees and that's what i replicated. I guess that's for some internal SoC synchronization reasons, but found no evidences of that. Anyway, what works for you, may not work for others, as long as the 660Mhz ddrbin has been in use for a long time in the armbian images and some people reported issues right here, so I recently reverted back to 330Mhz ddrbin for broader compatibility, although it is also a performance hit. There is another option so far, and it is the DDR Memory Controller driver, which works perfectly in the current mainline kernel, but requires the original Trust firmware that comes with rk3318 boards, which in turn, does not allow the chip to run above 1.1ghz, causing an artificial freeze. The DMC driver can switch the ddr frequency from 330 to 800mhz during runtime depending on the workload and would be perfect because does not involve the ddrbin manipulation, but the original Trust is a problem 😕

@callegar It looks like that the current kernel is still at 6.1.11 The prebuilt images will get the edge kernel, which is 6.3.x You have to switch to edge kernel, for example with armbian-config, but beware that edge is... edge! and it means that it is not as tested and might not be as stable as current

in armbian/rkbin repository

Yes, it could be the 660 Mhz ddr that is causing a bit too many troubles around. If have practice with hexadecimal editors, you can open the image find the red bytes in the top half of this screenshot and exchange with the red bytes in the lower half; save and try again.

Honestly, I don't know. I did not even know that rk322x could boot from a SPI device. About the USB thing, despite the "adapter" you may need to do what you ask, the boot options depend upon the original firmware you have on the SPI right now and, AFAIK, USB boot is not available in any original firmware. Surely the SOC itself is not capable to boot from USB, there should be a piece of software installed on the SPI (read: uboot) that will do that. If you put an sdcard in a USB dongle and then the USB dongle in the USB port clearly you're trying to boot from USB, so it won't work

Yes and no. They are known to report quite high temperatures but the heatsink is just barely warm. Surely a reported temperature of 80°C at idle is a bit too high. Mines are idling around 65°C

Nope, usually the ethernet is working very well by default and does not require any specific configuration: both phy and mac are in the 322x SoC, so once configured properly in the dtb, there are practically no chances of misconfiguration at kernel level. There may be some corner cases, but as long as this thread exists, I never encountered a board which required a specific configuration for ethernet.

You should use the images from this thread instead of the firefly

I'm afraid you have to find and use the emmc clock pin to enter in maskrom mode and clean the emmc with rkdeveloptool using a male-to-male cable

This is essential, since nand is supported only with legacy 4.4 kernel. That's clearly and boldly stated in the first page. That board is perfectly supported, but probably it is more convenient for you to run a fresh mainline kernel from sd card than an ancient legacy kernel from nand.

Sorry, just to be clear (I'm curious...): you tried the latest Ubuntu Lunar with edge 6.3 kernel you can download from https://github.com/armbian/community ?

@mydeardiary hello, as @RaptorSDS said, rtl8723as and rtl8723bs are two different chips and require different drivers and firmwares. rtl8723as driver is not in the linux kernel and looks like quite difficult to find a suitable driver. Libreelec folks did some adaptation for the rtl8723au: https://github.com/dtechsrv/LibreELEC-AML/pull/24

I would suggest you to keep the multitool around. Make a backup first of the entire system, but beware the 4G file size limit. You have to double check the validity of the compressed file after you make the backup, because the multitool won't give you errors 😕 You can use it in case something happens and you need to do maintenance. About the upgrade process per-se, I did a couple of times an upgrade from buster to bullseye and a "downgrade" from sid to bookworm. Despite the "usual" issues when doing upgrades, kernel and bootloaders have been kept at their places. Anyway check that the kernel, uInitrd and dtb files are still there in /boot after the upgrade (they should) and follow the standard debian/armbian upgrade instructions and cross the fingers!

@EmilB I'm getting quite confused among the "unmodified" and "original" attributes. Still I don't understand if you have had success in installa jumpstart on nand or not. One thing is sure: the bootloader of multitool and armbian is well able to boot from USB, so if you keep the sdcard in the slot, it will also try to boot from USB. As you see, there are several stages in the boot process that can lead to a multitude of situations, it's not easy to explain and understand the "tree" of options that will come out. One thing that is often sure is that if you completely erase the internal NAND/eMMC, the board will indeed boot from sdcard, but with NANDs if could be not so easy to completely erase the flash due to differences among the already installed bootloaders (ie: it may work from multitool, or may require rkdeveloptool, ...)

­DISCLAIMER (PLEASE READ): everything you can find in this thread (binaries, texts, code snippets, etc...) are provided AS-IS and are not part of official Armbian project. For this reason not people from Armbian project nor myself are responsible for misuse or loss of functionality of hardware. Please don't ask about support or assistance in other non-community forums nor in the official Armbian github repository, instead post your questions in this thread, in the TV Boxes forum section (hardware related) or in the Peer-to-peer support section (general linux/software related). Thank you! This thread is to give stable and mature long-term range support to rk3318/rk3328 found in many tv boxes in Armbian project as Community Supported Configuration (CSC). The current work is mainlined into Armbian project, but your mileage may vary; most recent developments live on my personal fork on github -> here <- Important notes: is just a personal opinion, but apparently widely supported, that rk3318 chip is not an official rockchip part. They probably are scrap rk3328 parts which have not passed conformance tests but are sold anyway to tv boxes manufacturers. They don’t reach the same operating frequency of the rk3328, have much higher leakage currents (and thus higher temperatures) and often the boards they are installed on are low quality with low quality components, in fact a very very common issue is the eMMC failure due to bad parts and bad soldering. So said, I personally suggest not to buy any rk3318 tv box, but instead find a properly supported SBC (Single Board Computer) if you need a reliable product. In the unfortunate case you already have such product, this thread may help you have some fun with them. What works: • Works on RK3318 and RK3328 TV boxes with DDR3 memories • Mainline u-boot • Mainline ATF provided as Trusted Execution Environment • All 4 cores are working • Ethernet • Serial UART (configured at stock 1.5Mbps) • Thermals and frequency scaling • OTG USB 2.0 port (also as boot device!) • EHCI/OHCI USB 2.0 ports and XHCI USB 3.0 ports • MMC subsystem (including , SD and sdio devices) • Hardware video acceleration (fully supported via RKMPP on legacy kernel, support via hantro and rkvdec kernel driver on mainline) • Various WIFI over SDIO are supported • Full acceleration on legacy kernel and mainline kernel • U-boot boot order priority: first the sdcard, then the USB OTG port and eventually the internal ; you can install u-boot (and the whole system) in the internal and u-boot will always check for images on external sdcard/USB first. Unbrick: Technically, rockchip devices cannot be bricked. If the internal flash does not contain a bootable system, they will always boot from the sdcard. If, for a reason, the bootable system on the internal flash is corrupted or is unable to boot correctly, you can always force the maskrom mode shorting the clock pin on the PCB. The procedure is explained here for rk322x, but for rk3318/28 is the same. In most of the rk3318/28 boards, shorting the clock pin is difficult or impossible because eMMC are BGA chips with no exposed pins. Pay double attention when burning something on the internal flash memory and always test first the image booting from the sdcard to be sure it works before burning anything in internal flash. This is a list of posts where forum users have been able to spot the eMMC clock pin to trigger the maskrom mode: H96 Max+ (board signature: RK3318_V1.4) by @Gausus X88 PRO 10 (board signature: X88_PRO_B) by @mathgaming HK1 Max (board signature YX_RK3318) by @Constantin Gatej Ninkbox N1 Max RK3318 by @enigmasphinx Hongtop H50 (board signature t98-3318-221-v11) by @GmP Partecipation and debugging: If you want to partecipate or need help debugging issues, do not hesitate to share your experience with the installation procedure of the boxes. In case of issues and missed support, provide as many as possible of these things is very useful to try and bring support for an unsupported board: some photos of both sides of the board. Details of the eMMC, DDR and Wifi chips are very useful! upload the device tree binary (dtb) of your device. We can understand a lot of things of the hardware from that small piece of data; and alternative is a link to the original firmware (you can do a full backup with the Multitool); dmesg and other logs (use armbianmonitor -u that automatically collects and uploads the logs online) attach a serial converter to the device and provide the output of the serial port; Multimedia: Mainline kernel: 3D acceleration is provided by Lima driver and is already enabled. Hardware video decoding: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/19258-testing-hardware-video-decoding-rockchip-allwinner/ Legacy kernel: If you need multimedia features, like OpenGL/OpenGL ES acceleration, hardware accelerated Kodi, ffmpeg and mpv you can take a look to this post Installation (via SD card): Building: You can build your own image follow the common steps to build armbian for other tv boxes devices: when you are in the moment to choose the target board, switch to /TVB/ boards and select "rk3318-box" from the list. Prebuilt images: Nightly stables - built from trunk by Armbian servers and GPG-signed: https://github.com/armbian/community Multitool: Multitool - A small but powerful image for RK3318/RK3328 TV Box maintenance. Download it from here Quick installation instructions on eMMC: Build or download your preferred Armbian image and a copy of the Multitool; Burn the Multitool on an SD card; once done, place the Armbian image in images folder of the SD card NTFS partition; Plug the SD card in the TV box and plug in the power cord. After some seconds the blue led starts blinking and the Multitool appears; OPTIONAL: you can do a backup of the existing firmware with "Backup flash" menu option; Choose "Burn image to flash" from the menu, then select the destination device (usually mmcblk2) and the image to burn; Wait for the process to complete, then choose "Shutdown" from main menu; Unplug the power cord and the SD card, then replug the power cord; Wait for 10 seconds, then the led should start blinking and HDMI will turn on. The first time the boot process will take a couple of minutes or more because the filesystem is going to be resized, so be patient and wait for the login prompt. On first boot you will be asked for entering a password for root user of your choice and the name and password for a regular user Run rk3318-config to configure the board specific options Run armbian-config to configure timezone, locales and other personal options Congratulations, Armbian is now installed! Despite the procedure above is simple and reliable, I always recommend to first test that your device boots Armbian images from SD Card. Due to the really large hardware variety, there is the rare chance that the images proposed here may not boot. If a bad image is burned in , the box may not boot anymore forcing you to follow the unbrick section at the top of this post. Quick installation instructions to boot from SD Card: If you are already running Armbian from eMMC, skip to the next step. Instead if you are running the original firmware you need to first erase the internal flash; to do so download the Multitool, burn it on an SD Card, plug the SD Card and power the TV Box. Use "Backup flash" if you want to do a backup of the existing firmware, then choose "Erase flash" menu option. Build or download your preferred Armbian image; Uncompress and burn the Armbian image on the SD Card; Plug the SD Card in the TV Box and power it on; Wait for 10 seconds, then the led should start blinking and HDMI will turn on. The first time the boot process will take a couple of minutes or more because the filesystem is going to be resized, so be patient and wait for the login prompt; On first boot you will be asked for entering a password for root user of your choice and the name and password for a regular user Run rk3318-config to configure the board specific options Run armbian-config to configure timezone, locales and other personal options, or also to transfer the SD Card installation to internal ; Congratulations, Armbian is running from SD Card! Tutorial - How to install Armbian on your TV Box (by @awawa) : https://www.hyperhdr.eu/2022/01/tv-box-mania-i-part-x88-pro-10.html A note about boot device order: With Armbian also comes mainline U-boot. If you install Armbian, the bootloader will look for valid bootable images in this order: External SD Card External USB Stick in OTG Port Internal The Multitool does not boot / How to burn image directly on eMMC: Some boards have the sdcard attached to an auxiliary (called also sdmmc_ext or external) controller which is not the common one. Forum findings declare that those boards are not able to boot from sdcard with stock firmware and they neither do in maskrom mode: the stock firmware always boots even if you put the multitool on sdcard. In such case, burning images directly on eMMC is the only way to have a working Armbian installation. You can follow these instructions by @fabiobassa to burn images directly on eMMC: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/17597-csc-armbian-for-rk3318rk3328-tv-box-boards/?do=findComment&comment=130453 Notes and special hardware: Script to change DDR memory frequency here Wireless chip AP2734, SP2734, HY2734C and similars: they are clones of AmPAK AP6334 which is combo wifi + bluetooth of broadcom BCM4334/B0 chips. You may need a special nvram file, instructions by @paradigman are here Critics, suggestions and contributions are welcome! Credits: @fabiobassa for his ideas, inspiration, great generosity in giving the boards for development and testing. The project of bringing rk3318 into armbian would not have begun without his support! @hexdump for his precious support in early testing, ideas and suggestions @MX10.AC2Nfor his patience in testing mxq-rk3328-d4 board support All the rockhip64 maintainers at Armbian project who have done and do most of the work to support the platform

DISCLAIMERS (PLEASE READ): Everything you can find in this thread (binaries, texts, code snippets, etc...) are provided AS-IS and are not part of official Armbian project. For this reason not people from Armbian project nor myself are responsible for misuse or loss of functionality of hardware. THIS POST explains very well the troubles with TV Boxes and why they are not suitable for everyone Please don't ask about support or assistance in other non-community forums nor in the official Armbian github repository, instead post your questions in this thread, in the TV Boxes forum section (hardware related) or in the Peer-to-peer support section (general linux/software related). Following the recent thread on LibreElec forum about an unofficial image for rk3229 devices, I would like to make public the work made by me and @fabiobassa about bringing rk322x support to armbian. The project is now in -> mainline Armbian <- development fork -> here <- This first page and the last 3 or 4 pages of the thread are enough to get up to date with recent developments. Many useful experiences are scattered through the thread, but the most important things are collected here in the first page, so please read it carefully! Mainline kernel is fully supported and will receive most support in the future. Legacy kernel 4.4 is deprecated, but is kept around only for special purposes. What works: Should boot and work flawlessy on all boards with RK3228a, RK3228b and RK3229, with either DDR2 and DDR3 memories. Mainline u-boot Proprietary OPTEE provided as Trusted Execution Environment (needed for DRAM frequency scaling) All 4 cores are working Ethernet Serial UART (configured at 115200 bps, not 1.5Mbps!) Thermals, CPU and DRAM frequency scaling OTG USB 2.0 port (also as boot device!) EHCI/OHCI USB 2.0 ports MMC subsystem (including eMMC, SD and sdio devices) Hardware video acceleration NAND is available only on legacy kernel. To fully boot from NAND, use the Multitool and its steP-nand installation (instructions are below) Various WIFI over SDIO are supported (SSV6051P, SSV6256P, ESP8089, Realtek chips, etc...), ssv6256p driver is available only on legacy kernel Full GPU acceleration U-boot boot order priority: first the sdcard, then the USB OTG port and eventually the internal eMMC; you can install u-boot (and the whole system) in the internal eMMC and u-boot will always check for images on external sdcard/USB first. Unbrick: Technically, rockchip devices cannot be bricked. If the internal flash does not contain a bootable system, they will always boot from the sdcard. If, for a reason, the bootable system on the internal flash is corrupted or is unable to boot correctly, you can always force the maskrom mode shorting the eMMC clock pin on the PCB. Here there is the procedure, but you can also google around if you get stuck on a faulty bootloader, the technique is pretty simple and requires a simple screwdriver. There are however some unfortunate cases (expecially newer boards) where shorting the eMMC clock pin is difficult or impossibile, like eMMC or eMCP BGA chips with no exposed pins. In those cases pay double attention when burning something on the internal eMMC/eMCP and always test first the image from the sdcard to be sure it works before burning anything on eMMC/eMCP. Some useful links with pins, pads or procedures for some boards: Generic procedure for boards with non-BGA eMMC MXQPRO_V71 - eMCP H20 - eMCP ZQ01 - eMCP NAND vs eMMC vs eMCP difference: RK3228 and RK3229 tv boxes comes with three different flash memory chips: eMMC, NAND and eMCP. It does not depend upon the market name of the tv box and neither the internal board; manufacturers put whatever they find cheaper when they buy the components. NAND chip is just the non-volatile memory eMMC chip contains both the non-volatile memory plus a controller. eMCP chip contains the non-volatile memory, a controller for the non-volatile memory (like eMMC), but also contains a bank of DDR SDRAM memory on the same physical chip. The difference is very important, because eMMC and eMCP are far easier to support at various levels: the controller deals with the physical characteristics of the non-volatile memory, so the software has no to deal with. NAND chips instead are harder to support, because the software is required to deal with the physical characteristics and non-standard things that depends upon the NAND manufacturer. If you have a NAND chips you're unlucky because mainline kernel currently cannot access it, but also because you need special care and instructions explained later. You can discover if you have a NAND, eMMC or eMCP chip looking on the board are reading the signature on the flash memory chip. The Multitool (see later) also can detect which chip you have onboard: the program will warn you at startup if you have a NAND chip. NAND bootloader upgrade: IMPORTANT: don't do this is you have an eMMC or eMCP; skip this paragraph if you are unsure too! For very expert people who are having issues when (re)booting images, there is the chance to upgrade the bootloader on NAND. The NAND bootloader is nothing else than a regular idbloader (see official rockchip documentation) but contains some bits to correctly access the data on your flash memory. Upgrading requires to erase the existing flash content, in the worst case will require you to follow the Unbrick procedure above or restore an older but more compatible bootloader. If you are not mentally ready to overcome possible further issues, don't do this! The detailed instructions and the binaries are available at this post Multimedia: Mainline kernel: 3D acceleration is provided by Lima driver and is already enabled. Hardware video decoding: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/19258-testing-hardware-video-decoding-rockchip-allwinner/ Deprecated legacy kernel: multimedia features, like OpenGL/OpenGL ES acceleration, hardware accelerated Kodi, ffmpeg and mpv you can take a look to this post An effective tutorial from @Hai Nguyen on how to configure a box as a hi-quality music player using an USB audio card, and controlling it via remote control is available in this post Brief explanation about kernel naming: current kernel is the mainline LTS kernel version, most maintained and tested. This is the suggested version for production devices. If you don't know what to pick, pick this. legacy kernel (version 4.4) is provided by manufacturer; it is deprecated, unmaintained and not suggested. edge kernel is the development mainline kernel version, with experimental features and drivers; usually stable but perhaps suitable for production devices. You can switch from one kernel flavour to another using armbian-config or manually via apt. Installation (via SD card): Building: You can build your own image follow the common steps to build armbian for other tv boxes devices: when you are in the moment to choose the target board, switch to CSC/TVB/EOL boards and select "rk322x-box" from the list. Download prebuilt images from the following links: Archive builds (GPG-signed) - https://imola.armbian.com/dl/rk322x-box/archive/ SUGGESTED - Nightly built from trunk each week by Armbian servers (GPG-signed) - https://github.com/armbian/community Old images provided by me (unsigned and outdated) - https://users.armbian.com/jock/rk322x/armbian/stable Archived/older images: https://armbian.hosthatch.com/archive/rk322x-box/archive/ Multitool: The Multitool is a small but powerful tool to do quick backup/restore of internal flash, but also burn images and general system rescue and maintenance via terminal or SSH. Compressed images will be uncompressed on fly. Multitool - A small but powerful image for RK322x TV Box maintenance (instructions to access via network here) Quick installation instructions on eMMC: Build or download your preferred Armbian image and a copy of the Multitool; Burn the Multitool on an SD card; once done, place the Armbian image in images folder of the SD card NTFS partition; Plug the SD card in the TV box and plug in the power cord. After some seconds the blue led starts blinking and the Multitool appears; OPTIONAL: you can do a backup of the existing firmware with "Backup flash" menu option; Choose "Burn image to flash" from the menu, then select the destination device (usually mmcblk2) and the image to burn; Wait for the process to complete, then choose "Shutdown" from main menu; Unplug the power cord and the SD card, then replug the power cord; Wait for 10 seconds, then the led should start blinking and HDMI will turn on. The first time the boot process will take a couple of minutes or more because the filesystem is going to be resized, so be patient and wait for the login prompt. On first boot you will be asked for entering a password for root user of your choice and the name and password for a regular user Run sudo rk322x-config and select your board characteristics to enable leds, wifi chips, high-speed eMMC, etc... Run sudo armbian-config to configure timezone, locales and other personal options Congratulations, Armbian is now installed and configured! Despite the procedure above is simple and reliable, I always recommend to first test that your device boots Armbian images from SD Card. Due to the really large hardware variety, there is the rare chance that the images proposed here may not boot. If a bad image is burned in eMMC, the box may not boot anymore forcing you to follow the unbrick section at the top of this post. Quick installation instructions on NAND: Build or download your preferred Armbian image and a copy of the Multitool; Burn the Multitool on an SD card; once done, place the Armbian legacy kernel image in images folder of the SD card NTFS partition; Plug the SD card in the TV box and plug in the power cord. After some seconds the blue led starts blinking and the Multitool appears; OPTIONAL: you can do a backup of the existing firmware with "Backup flash" menu option; Choose "Burn Armbian image via steP-nand" from the menu, then select the destination device (usually rknand0) and the image to burn; Wait for the process to complete, then choose "Shutdown" from main menu; Unplug the power cord and the SD card, then replug the power cord; Wait for 10 seconds, then the led should start blinking and HDMI will turn on. The first time the boot process will take a couple of minutes or more because the filesystem is going to be resized, so be patient and wait for the login prompt. On first boot you will be asked for entering a password for root user of your choice and the name and password for a regular user Run sudo rk322x-config and select your board characteristics to enable leds, wifi chips, etc... Run armbian-config to configure timezone, locales and other personal options Congratulations, Armbian is now installed! Alternative: you can install the bootloader in NAND and let it boot from SD Card or USB: Download a copy of the Multitool and burn it on an SD card; Plug the SD card in the TV box and plug in the power cord. After some seconds the blue led starts blinking and the Multitool appears; RECOMMENDED: make a backup of the existing firmware with "Backup flash" menu option; Choose "Install Jump Start for Armbian" menu option: the Jump Start uses the internal NAND to boot from external SD Card or external USB Stick; Follow the general instructions to boot from SD Card below, skip the first erase eMMC step. Quick installation instructions to boot from SD Card: If you are already running Armbian from eMMC, skip to the next step. Instead if you are running the original firmware you need to first erase the internal eMMC; to do so download the Multitool, burn it on an SD Card, plug the SD Card and power the TV Box. Use "Backup flash" if you want to do a backup of the existing firmware, then choose "Erase flash" menu option. Build or download your preferred Armbian image; Uncompress and burn the Armbian image on the SD Card; Plug the SD Card in the TV Box and power it on; Wait for 10 seconds, then the led should start blinking and HDMI will turn on. The first time the boot process will take a couple of minutes or more because the filesystem is going to be resized, so be patient and wait for the login prompt; On first boot you will be asked for entering a password for root user of your choice and the name and password for a regular user Run sudo rk322x-config and select your board characteristics to enable leds, wifi chips, high-speed eMMC or NAND, etc... Run armbian-config to configure timezone, locales and other personal options, or also to transfer the SD Card installation to internal eMMC; Congratulations, Armbian is running from SD Card! A note about boot device order: With Armbian also comes mainline U-boot. If you install Armbian or just the bootloader in the eMMC or the Jump Start on internal NAND, the bootloader will look for valid bootable images in this order: External SD Card External USB Stick in OTG Port Internal eMMC Installation (without SD card, board with eMMC) If you have no sd card slot and your board has an eMMC, you can burn the armbian image directly on the internal eMMC using rkdeveloptool and a male-to-male USB cable: Download your preferred Armbian image from Armbian download page and decompress it. Download the rk322x bootloader: rk322x_loader_v1.10.238_256.bin Download a copy of rkdeveloptool: a compiled binary is available in the official rockchip-linux rkbin github repository. Unplug the power cord from the tv box Plug an end of an USB Male-to-male cable into the OTG port (normally it is the lone USB port on the same side of the Ethernet, HDMI, analog AV connectors) while pressing the reset microbutton with a toothpick. You can find the reset microbutton in a hole in the back of the box, but sometimes it is hidden into the AV analog jack Plug the other end of the USB Male-to-male cable into an USB port of your computer If everything went well, run lsusb: you should see a device with ID 2207:320b Run sudo rkdeveloptool rd 3 (if this fails don't worry and proceed to next step) Run sudo rkdeveloptool db rk322x_loader_v1.10.238_256.bin Run sudo rkdeveloptool wl 0x0 image.img (change image.img this with the real Armbian image filename) Unplug the power cord Done! Installation (without SD card, board with NAND) If you are in the unfortunate case you can't use an SD card for installation and your board has a NAND chip, you still have an option to use the quick Multitool installation steps via USB. Obtain a copy of rkdeveloptool: a compiled binary is available in the official rockchip-linux rkbin github repository. Unplug the power cord from the tv box Plug an end of an USB Male-to-male cable into the OTG port (normally it is the lone USB port on the same side of the Ethernet, HDMI, analog AV connectors) while pressing the reset microbutton with a toothpick. You can find the reset microbutton in a hole in the back of the box, but sometimes it is hidden into the AV analog jack Plug the other end of the USB Male-to-male cable into an USB port of your computer If everyting went well, using lsusb you should see a device with ID 2207:320b Run sudo rkdeveloptool wl 0x4000 u-boot-main.img (download u-boot-main.img.xz , don't forget to decompress it!) Unplug the power cord Now you can follow the instructions on how to install on eMMC/NAND via SD card, just use instead an USB stick to do all the operations and plug it into the USB OTG port. Once you reboot, USB OTG port will be used as a boot device. NOTE: NAND users without SD slot may be unhappy to know that it will be difficult to do extra maintenance with Multitool in case something breaks in the installed Armbian system: installing u-boot-main.img makes the installed system unbootable because it is missing the NAND driver. Alternative backup, restore and erase flash for EXPERTS: These backup, restore and erase flash procedures are for experts only. They are kept here mostly for reference, since the Multitool is perfectly able to do same from a very comfy interface and is the suggested way to do maintenance. Backup: Obtain a copy of rkdeveloptool: a compiled binary is available in the official rockchip-linux rkbin github repository. If you prefer, you can compile it yourself from the sources available at official rockchip repository Unplug the power cord from the tv box Plug an end of an USB Male-to-male cable into the OTG port (normally it is the lone USB port on the same side of the Ethernet, HDMI, analog AV connectors) while pressing the reset microbutton with a toothpick. You can find the reset microbutton in a hole in the back of the box, but sometimes it is hidden into the AV analog jack Plug the other end of the USB Male-to-male cable into an USB port of your computer If everyting went well, using lsusb you should see a device with ID 2207:320b change directory and move into rkbin/tools directory, run ./rkdeveloptool rfi then take note of the FLASH SIZE megabytes (my eMMC is 8Gb, rkdeveloptool reports 7393 megabytes) run ./rkdeveloptool rl 0x0 $((FLASH_SIZE * 2048)) backup.data (change FLASH_SIZE with the value you obtained the step before) once done, the internal eMMC is backed up to backup.data file Restore: first we have to restore the original bootloader, then restore the original firmware. Running rkdeveloptool with these switches will accomplish both the jobs: ./rkdeveloptool db rk322x_loader_v1.10.238_256.bin Downloading bootloader succeeded. ./rkdeveloptool ul rk322x_loader_v1.10.238_256.bin Upgrading loader succeeded. ./rkdeveloptool wl 0x0 backup.data Write LBA from file (100%) Download here: Erase the flash memory: clearing the internal eMMC/NAND memory makes the SoC look for external SD Card as first boot option. If there isn't any suitable SD Card, the SoC enters maskrom mode, which can then be used for full eMMC/NAND access using rkdeveloptool. This is perfectly fine if your box has an eMMC flash memory. NOTE: In case you have a NAND flash memory this option is however discouraged. The original bootloader contains some special parameters to correctly access the data. Clearing the flash memory will probably garbage the NAND data and restoring the bootloader may require some special instructions. Obtain a copy of rkdeveloptool: a compiled binary is available in the official rockchip-linux rkbin github repository. If you prefer, you can compile it yourself from the sources available at official rockchip repository Unplug the power cord from the board Plug an end of an USB Male-to-male cable into the OTG port (normally it is the lone USB port on the same side of the Ethernet, HDMI, analog AV connectors) while pressing the reset microbutton with a toothpick. You can find the reset microbutton in a hole in the back of the box, but sometimes it is hidden into the AV analog jack Plug the other end of the USB Male-to-male cable into an USB port of your computer If everyting went well, using lsusb you should see a device with ID 2207:320b run ./rkdeveloptool ef and wait a few seconds once done, the internal eMMC is erased and the device will boot from the sdcard from now on Partecipation and debugging: If you want to partecipate or need help debugging issues, do not hesitate to share your experience with the installation procedure of the boxes. In case of issues and missed support, provide as many as possible of these things is very useful to try and bring support for an unsupported board: some photos of both sides of the board. Details of the eMMC, DDR and Wifi chips are very useful! upload the device tree binary (dtb) of your device. We can understand a lot of things of the hardware from that small piece of data; and alternative is a link to the original firmware (you can do a full backup with the Multitool); dmesg and other logs (use armbianmonitor -u that automatically collects and uploads the logs online) attach a serial converter to the device and provide the output of the serial port; Critics, suggestions and contributions are welcome! Credits: @fabiobassa for his ideas, inspiration, great generosity in giving the boards for development and testing. The project of bringing rk322x into armbian would not have begun without his support! Justin Swartz, for his work and research to bring mainline linux on rk3229 (repository here) @knaerzche for his great contribution to libreelec support and mainline patches @Alex83 for his patience in testing the NAND bootloader upgrade procedure on his board @Jason Duhamell for his generous donation that allowed researching eMCP boards and esp8089 wifi chip

DISCLAIMER (PLEASE READ): everything you can find in this thread (binaries, texts, code snippets, etc...) are provided AS-IS and are not part of official Armbian project. For this reason not people from Armbian project nor myself are responsible for misuse or loss of functionality of hardware. Please don't ask about support or assistance in other non-community forums nor in the official Armbian github repository, instead post your questions in this thread, in the TV Boxes forum section (hardware related) or in the Peer-to-peer support section (general linux/software related). Thank you! This is CSC Armbian for XT-Q8L-V10 boards, also known as Chiptrip Q8, Vsmart Q8, ENY 3288 Q8, etc... All source code has been merged into Armbian mainline project. I still keep my personal public Armbian fork for experimental features: https://github.com/paolosabatino/armbian-build Nightly images: download directory Quick installation instructions on eMMC: Build or download your preferred Armbian image from Download directory and a copy of the Multitool; Burn the Multitool on an SD card; once done, place the Armbian image in images folder of the SD card NTFS partition; Plug the SD card in the TV box and plug in the power cord. After some seconds the blue led starts blinking and the Multitool appears; OPTIONAL: you can do a backup of the existing firmware with "Backup flash" menu option; Choose "Burn image to flash" from the menu, then select the destination device (usually mmcblk2) and the image to burn; Wait for the process to complete, then choose "Shutdown" from main menu; Unplug the sd card, then push the power button for 1 second (the led will turn blue) After 10 seconds HDMI will turn on and you will get logging messages; On first boot you will be asked for entering a password for root user of your choice and the name and password for a regular user Run armbian-config to configure timezone, locales and other personal options Congratulations, Armbian is now installed! Boot from SD Card/USB stick (with Armbian already installed in eMMC, empty eMMC or no eMMC😞 Build or download your preferred Armbian image from Download directory; Burn the image on your SD card/USB stick; Plug the SD card/USB stick in the device; Push the power button for 1 second (the led will turn blue); After 10 seconds HDMI will turn on and you will get logging messages; On first boot you will be asked for entering a password for root user of your choice and the name and password for a regular user Run armbian-config to configure timezone, locales and other personal options Congratulations, Armbian is now installed! Boot from SD Card/USB stick (with original firmware or other firmware): In case your box has the original firmware installed, use the Multitool to erase the internal flash. Don't worry, you will not brick your box: once the eMMC is emptied, the box will automatically boot from SD Card. This is called Maskrom mode and is common to all Rockchip devices. Instructions and download links for the Multitool are at the bottom of this post. After erasing the internal eMMC, just follow the "Boot from SD Card" procedure above and then you are fine. Boot priority: Newer images (those with mainline kernel >= 4.14.50) now support booting from multiple devices. Priority is fixed and boot devices are probed in this order: External SD card External USB storage device (Any USB Stick/Hard drive attached to USB host ports) Internal eMMC This way even if you install armbian to internal eMMC, you can still easily test different images booting from external devices. Experts notes: when armbian is installed into eMMC you get U-boot installed too in eMMC. This is important to know because the box won't boot in Maskrom Mode, but instead will always boot the embedded U-boot, no matter if you put an sdcard/usb stick. In practice the embedded U-boot is totally responsible for the boot priority. If you want to restore the Maskrom Mode, just erase U-boot from eMMC using this command: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mmcblk2 seek=64 count=8128 conv=sync,fsync Current status: Wireless: works. pretty fast and stable, signal is strong on my box; Bluetooth: works. I was able to transfer files and stream audio without problems USB ports: works, with autosuspend too. A quick benchmark show that transfer rate is quite good (topped at 34 MB/s) USB OTG: works in host mode. Transfer rate is very good (> 40 MB/s) MMC: works and is perfectly accessible as storage device. The images above with "eMMC friendly" have been tested and work when installed in eMMC using the standard armbian-config eMMC installer SDCard: works. legacy kernel is limited to high speed, while mainline works fine in UHS mode too. A quick benchmark with a Samsung EVO card shows the promised 48Mb/s read speed. Gigabit Ethernet: works, fast and reliably HDMI: works perfectly Serial: works Audio: both HDMI audio and SPDIF connector works IR remote: works on legacy and mainline kernels Reboot/Suspend process: rebooting the device is a working in progress, at the moment sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Suspend is still not available. Hardware acceleration: everything which works for rk3288 boards applies here too. This guide or maybe the Media Testing Script will help you gain an hardware accelerated X11 and Chromium (using GL4ES I enjoyed Quake 2 from the start till the end, but also Quake and Quake III Arena work flawlessy, here a quick how-to to compile and install GL4ES) Multimedia: On mainline kernel 3D acceleration is provided by Panfrost driver and is already enabled. Hardware video decoding: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/19258-testing-hardware-video-decoding-rockchip-allwinner/ Multitool: The Multitool is a small but powerful tool to easy operate on internal eMMC flash of RK3288 devices. Features: Backup the content of internal eMMC Restore a previously backed-up image to eMMC Erase the eMMC (via fast blkdiscard or zero-fill as fallback) Burn an Armbian (or LibreELEC) image directly on the eMMC Provide a recovery shell for manual maintenance Windows-friendly: everything is placed in a NTFS partition Image compression format autodetection: they are decompressed on-the-fly during burn process Network support for remote maintenance via SSH (instructions to access via network here) Instructions are simple: Download the image from here Burn it on an sdcard Open the NTFS partition with your preferred file manager Place the images you want to burn on the device in images directory (backups will be stored in backups directory) Plug the sd card in the RK3288 device Power the device and wait few seconds, the Multitool menu will appear on screen and can be navigated with the keyboard Last edit: 07/06/2020 - updated installation instructions