c0rnelius

Getting this working doesn't appear to be complicated, but I personally don't like playing guessing games. I'll see if I can get the baseboard.

I don't have that baseboard to run tests on, but my guess would be it needs its own DTS file or at the very least, the current one would need to be edited. This would more than likely be true for a lot of obscure baseboard out there, as stated in the initial commit to mainline. The keywords there are "should work fine". To me, it sounds like something just needs to be tweaked on the USB front.

I have an X96-AIR-GBIT and from what I can see reviewing the DTS files, it is not much different than the MAX. What I do to get the ETH working is make the following changes to &ethmac https://github.com/pyavitz/debian-image-builder/blob/feature/patches/amlogic/6.1/004-arch-arm64-dts-amlogic-meson-sm1-x96-air.patch#L39 https://github.com/pyavitz/debian-image-builder/blob/feature/patches/amlogic/6.1/004-arch-arm64-dts-amlogic-meson-sm1-x96-air.patch#L219 Using that as a reference, you should be able to edit the DTS in Armbian and if all goes well have functional ETH.

Although this is doable. It would be a fairly large undertaking. Any services and custom services currently used, would need a sysvinit equivalent. Then there is the question, would this also need to be integrated into armbian-config? Probably, yes. Would all features in armbian-config even be supported in Devuan? I seriously doubt it. Also depending on how debs specific to Armbian are currently put together and the depends they may or may not have, those would also need to be modified. Plus it would need to be extensively tested. I have found some scripts I run that are linked to services sometimes need modification when using them on Devuan. For a lot of boards though, on a basic level. It could be done.

I've been around. This method generally works well in my testing on both Amlogic and Allwinner boards. The only catch is, some USB ports don't work as well as others "or at all?", so it requires a little trial and error. I've been told by some users that adding a sleep and USB reset to the script also helps when having issues. But I've personally never needed to do so. As long as the drive is properly powered, it should just work.

I use a similar approach but also include a boot script. boot.cmd: setenv bootlabel "USB Boot" usb start; if usb dev ${devnum}; then devtype=usb; run scan_dev_for_boot_part; fi Flash img to SDCARD, flash Armbian to USB drive, insert into unit and power on. https://github.com/pyavitz/binary/releases/download/images/meson64_odroidc4-usb-boot.img

This requires patching, I'm not sure if it has been submitted yet. You are more than welcome to test it. 001-arch-arm64-dts-sun50i-h5-thermal-support.patch A similar patch is also needed for the A64.