I have worked through the installation of Armbian Ubuntu 18.04 to the embedded MMC in an ESPRESSObin v7. It took a while and there were some quirks along the way, so here is a procedure with observations that may be useful to others.
The Armbian u-boot does not appear to recognise the eMMC. I used Globalscale's u-boot espressobin-bootloader-cpu-1000-ddr4-1cs-1g
I created a USB stick using the standard procedure and booted the ESPRESSObin from this.
I copied the Armbian .img file to the ESPRESSObin USB system and used this to flash the eMMC
sudo dd if= Armbian_5.69_Espressobin_Debian_stretch_next_4.19.14 of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=128K status=progress
I could then mount the Linux partition on the eMMC.
sudo mkdir /mnt/emmc
sudo mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt/emmc
Note that the eMMC u-boot device number is "1" (not the hard-coded 0 in the boot.scr) so I edited /mnt/emmc/boot/boot.cmd to use $devnum instead:
...
# use $devnum in place of hard-coded 0
ext4load $boot_interface $devnum:1 $kernel_addr ${prefix}$image_name
ext4load $boot_interface $devnum:1 $initrd_addr ${prefix}$initrd_image
ext4load $boot_interface $devnum:1 $fdt_addr ${prefix}$fdt_name_a
ext4load $boot_interface $devnum:1 $fdt_addr ${prefix}$fdt_name_b
I generated the boot.scr u-boot file:
sudo mkimage -C none -A arm -T script -d /mnt/emmc/boot/boot.cmd /mnt/emmc/boot/boot.scr
I rebooted with the USB stick removed. The system booted from the eMMC, however there were some issues with the Ubuntu system...
The Linux startup waited for two minutes for systemd-networkd-wait-online.service. This appears to be a common issue with multiple Ethernet ports. I disabled the systemd-networkd-wait-online.service
sudo systemctl disable systemd-networkd-wait-online.service
The Ubuntu system would not use the DHCP provided DNS server. I modifed /etc/systemd/resolved.conf to remove the default DNS server (1.0.0.1)
The naming of the Ethernet ports in Armbian is different to Globalscale's
Front view
USB2.0 lan1 lan0 wan USB3.0 (Armbian)
USB2.0 wan lan0 lan1 USB3.0 (Globalscale)
I set my system with three nn-bridged Ethernet ports
ls /etc/systemd/network/
10-br0.netdev.disbled 10-br0.network.disabled 10-eth0.network 10-lan0.network 10-lan1.network 10-wan.network
cat /etc/systemd/network/*
[NetDev]
Name=br0
Kind=bridge
[Match]
Name=br0
[Network]
#DHCP=ipv4
#BindCarrier=eth0
[Match]
Name=eth0
[Network]
[Match]
Name=lan0
[Network]
#Bridge=br0
DHCP=ipv4
BindCarrier=eth0
[Match]
Name=lan1
[Network]
#Bridge=br0
DHCP=ipv4
BindCarrier=eth0
[Match]
Name=wan
[Network]
#Bridge=br0
DHCP=ipv4
BindCarrier=eth0
I could not find a way to specify the MAC addresses for the Ethernet ports so I installed macchanger and go it to assign random MACs at startup. See https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MAC_address_spoofing for setup.
