hexdump

it was supposed to be released by now already and looks like its delayed by another year now ... announcements are one thing and real hardware with good software support another

that one is not really armbian - but you can try it as a start - not sure if it will boot out of the box on an asus c100pa, but with some dtb trying/tweaking it might work ... it works for me on a medion s2013 chromebook ... in case you get it booting, do not expect wlan etc. to work out of the box for sure good luck and best wishes - hexdump

i think it could be a generic a20 problem - maybe have a look at: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/7575-k-worker-problem-on-a20-based-boards/ https://forum.armbian.com/topic/14282-headless-systems-and-sun4i_drm_hdmi-a10a20/ https://superuser.com/questions/1515001/debian-10-buster-on-cubietruck-with-bug-in-sun4i-drm-hdmi best wishes - hexdump

@jps1x2 - as this is not strictly armbian related, could you please open a github issue on my u-boot-misc repo so that we can discuss it there?

@jps1x2 - if you do not feel comfortable doing the low level changes needed, then it might be better to keep this box running android and try to get something else better supported i would suggest. best wishes - hexdump

i think the a5x max+ is one of the weird boxes which has the sd card not wired at the proper mmc port and thus cannot boot from sd card at all - i once made a hack for my h96max (same problem) to replace the legacy u-boot on emmc with a mainline one configured for this strange mmc setup and reading extlinux then first from the sd card - this way i can boot it now quite normally from sd card - but: this hack is risky as you can easily brick your box doing such low level things, this hack worked for me and my box but it does not have to work for yours and you are on your own when trying this - here are some notes from my hack back then: https://github.com/hexdump0815/u-boot-misc/blob/master/readme.rk3328-no-sd-boot ... btw. i think interrupting u-boot on rockchip boxes is usually disabled best wishes - hexdump

i do not know any details, i just know that is why the u-boot.ext was there ... maybe just give a mainline c4 u-boot a try and chainload that? i would not recommend to touch the legacy u-boot on the box as long as you do not know 100% what you are doing (maybe you do know 100%) as its very easy to brick a box this way due to wrong memory timings best wishes - hexdump

i think this was due to amlogic messing up the video mode with current mainline kernels in later versions of their legacy u-boot - the solution was to chainload a u-boot which sets the video mode properly (no more false colors) from the legacy u-boot on the box ...

as far as i know there is no open source support at all yet for either h313 or h616 allwinner chips - so no armbian or anything else i guess ...

not sure if it is related, but i once had a tv box where the android on it changed the permissions and ownership to world readable etc. on all attached filesystems when it booted and as such also completely trashed the linux on the sd card - this was absolutely reproducible on that box ...

@Amor Asad - just try the s905w p281 dtb, i think it should just work - there is nothing really special about the tx3 mini, its just a normal s905w tv box

maybe that helps, but running this board at only 1 ghz sounds a bit strange

maybe @jock has an idea? - i think he is quite familiar with the rk3228 boot

@rna - this is the thread for rk3228/rk3229 boxes btw.:

@odin - maybe the hdmi part is not yet working well enough on s912 - i'll build a non hdmi version for you during the next days ... serial log looks good, from that point on the serial console is disabled, so nothing more to see ...

@jock - i think so far i asked you way more questions already than you me, so that is no problem at all i have it working quite well for s905 (gxbb) and s905x/w/l (gxl) with the mentioned limitation that i had to disable the serial console to make it reliable (otherwise it was sometimes hanging in the boot prompt if the serial console was not connected) ... i think @balbes150 is partially using it chainloaded as well for some of his images and it seems to work i guess ... just give it a try if you know what you are doing (which i think you know) and know the maskrom mode pin of your box worst case ... here are some for gxl: https://github.com/hexdump0815/u-boot-misc/releases/download/200718-01/boot-amlogic_gxl_atf-aarch64-tx3-mini-l.dd.gz https://github.com/hexdump0815/u-boot-misc/releases/download/200718-01/boot-amlogic_gxl_atf-aarch64-a95x-r2.dd.gz https://github.com/hexdump0815/u-boot-misc/releases/download/200718-01/boot-amlogic_gxl_atf-aarch64-x96-mini-nand.dd.gz the first two are s905w and the last is s905l (to be written like mentioned in the post above) ... those are for running them directly on sd card (erasing the emmc first) and they should work on emmc too (own risk - i tested it successful on two s905w boxes) ... or you can chainload them: https://github.com/hexdump0815/u-boot-misc/releases/download/200718-01/gxl-u-boot.bin.gz same for s905 (gxbb): https://github.com/hexdump0815/u-boot-misc/releases/download/200718-01/boot-amlogic_gxb_atf-aarch64.dd.gz or chainloaded: https://github.com/hexdump0815/u-boot-misc/releases/download/200718-01/gxb-u-boot.bin.gz gxbb is a bit tricky to impossible to write to emmc as it does not keep the first sector free on emmc (on sd card it does) - maybe its doable somehow and maybe using /dev/mmcblkXboot0 or boot1 might be an option? (not tested yet) currently i'm working on the same level of support for sm1 (s905x3 - partially working), g12a (s905x2 - not yet working), s912 (should work but only minimally tested) and maybe g12b (s922x/a311d) best wishes - hexdump

as i'm currently working on mainline u-boot for amlogic tv boxes you might give this one a try: https://github.com/hexdump0815/u-boot-misc/releases/download/200926-01/boot-amlogic_gxm-aarch64-nexbox-a1.dd.gz (please gunzip it first) - you can write it with dd if=boot-amlogic_gxm-aarch64-nexbox-a1.dd of=/dev/your-sd-card bs=512 seek=1 skip=1 status=progress ... it is a bit special as it is using hdmi output and usb kbd input and disables the serial console (as otherwise it migth give noise on the cmdline) ... and it is untested (i have tested a similar u-boot in an a bit different context), but just give it a try and let me know if it works ... building an s912 mainline u-boot for a tv box is not trivial and might require a dump of the original u-boot of the target box - here are my loose notes for creating it: https://github.com/hexdump0815/u-boot-misc/blob/gxm-experiments/readme.gxl best wishes - hexdump

amlogic should boot automatically from sd card if there is no proper boot block on emmc ... but maybe first try to solder a serial console to your board to check if emmc is really dead - it could also be that the u-boot and boot blocks around it are simply corrupted ...

i think the best you can do is trying to connect a serial console to it - then you'll see for sure if it still gives signs of life from it or not and what you get then might help you to find possible options to recover it if recovery is still possible ... a dead emmc might result in the behaviour you describe: as the balbes images use the legacy u-boot on emmc on the box for booting on amlogic and a broken or dead emmc might result in nothing happening when turning on the box, but of course it can also be completely dead or just something trivially corrupted.

@chess12 - what did you do different in the end so that it worked?

what is the big problem with the spi flash? if you flash a chainloaded u-boot instead of the chromeos kernel it can be used just normally using that mainline u-boot using regular gpt partitions etc. ... another reason might the the blob character of the early boot stages, but i would say half of the armbian supported systems need some kind of blob (scp firmware, memory initialization etc.) for booting best wishes - hexdump

btw. how about a wayland compositor and xwayland in it to run x apps - i was surprised recently when i played around with it in another context on a raspberry pi (running 64bit ubuntu and using weston as compositor) that an opengl app running in xwayland that way was 3d hw accelerated via the vc4 mesa driver ...

i think zram is good as long as you want to (and can) live without swap at all - zswap is good if you'll need a bit of swap and i made some quite good experiences especially since it supports zstd and 3fold modes which results in about 1:3 compression ratio usually ... it cannot do any wonders, so it is better to use it with at least a bit of ram (i would recommend 2gb real ram at minimum if you run a desktop as otherwise it will eat quite a bit of cpu for compressing and decompressing the memory all the time, maybe 1gb is ok for a server) ... a good side effect of it is that everything swapped out will be compressed too, so less io to emmc or sd card which is good ... the confusing part about it is that counts the compressed pages before compression and the pages swapped out together as swap in free or top, so it looks like it is using a lot of real swap while in reality it does not. i created a little script for myself to get a better overview of its memory numbers here: https://github.com/hexdump0815/imagebuilder/blob/dev/files/extra-files/root/zswap-stats.sh like and this is the config i'm using: # do some low memory optimization by using zswap memory compression echo zstd > /sys/module/zswap/parameters/compressor echo z3fold > /sys/module/zswap/parameters/zpool # default is 20, less means less compressed memory and less cpu usage # for compression, more is the other way around, depends on actual hw # with 10 there is no big win on memory, but only compressed pages # are written to the swap sapce and thus io to emmc/sd is reduced echo 10 > /sys/module/zswap/parameters/max_pool_percent echo 1 > /sys/module/zswap/parameters/enabled best wishes - hexdump

allwinner h6 tv boxes usually do not have a voltage regulator for the cpu voltage and thus always run at full voltage even if the frequency is scaled down, so throttling is very inefficient here - in my experience they close to always need active cooling to deal with any serious load for a longer time at full cpu frequency ... i only have one board where i replaced the original heat sink with a much larger one and added fresh high quality thermal paste between it and the soc and that one can run without a fan if not in a case (i.e. good air flow) ... s905x3 is much cooler as its cores are done in a 12nm process vs. the 28nm process of the h6

no - you can install to internal emmc just fine too and you can even get rid of the chromeos boot screen ... i run my snow and veyron chromebooks this way and they run quite well ... the images are just to have an easy starting point for others who want to play around with linux on this hardware as its much easier to do all the preparations for an emmc install from a running linux system instead from chromeos and its also handy to have a working sd card linux system around in case one breaks the emmc install ... i decided for chainloading u-boot for booting as trying to install a new low level boot loader is a lot of hassle and you can really brick the device