SteeMan

What type of monitor do you have connected? If you have another monitor, I'd try that. What I find works best is a monitor that is native 1920x1080. I sometimes have issues with monitors that are higher resolution or lower resolution than a standard 1080P display. Otherwise finding the uart pads is the only other advice I have, so that you can see what is going on during the boot.

I'll provide some background on what you are experiencing. 6.1 is the vendor kernel. This is what comes from rockchip and is a hacked together set of code that they release to board builders. Armbian doesn't have really any interest in maintaining this code base. 6.12 is mainline Linux directly from kernel.org with some additional.patches applied. It often tales years for the open source community to get new CPU variants incorporated into the mainline kernel code base, as the vendors (rockchip and OrangePi in this case) don't generally contribute. So 6.12 is actually far behind in feature support for your board. The edge kernel, 6 16 would be better. But if you want a feature complete kernel.for your board, the 6.1 vendor kernel is best. If you want security updates but can deal with lack of some features, then the edge kernel should be your choice (at least until early next year when Armbian current moves to the next Linux LTS release). Also, from the perspective of best boards under Armbian, you probably are better off with Armbian supported boards, not a community supported board which by definition doesn't have anyone maintaining it. Final note, is that Orange Pi as a company does nothing to support the open source community. I'd say their main goal is to pump out new hardware as fast as possible and not supporting older hardware in any way to force people to spend more money with them. In general support and software is a huge cost and doesn't provide any profit for them, so they choose not to provide it.

Currently yes. A replacement for this package / service needs to be found and implement - in case you want to get involved. This isn't completely true. Armbian still does utilize CPUMIN/CPUMAX from /etc/default/cpufrequtils if present to set corresponding frequencies via the Armbian script armbian-hardware-optimization (packages/bsp/common/usr/lib/armbian/armbian-hardware-optimization). This script I believe runs at every system startup. So even without the cpufrequitls package installed, there is still some functionality in this area. Functionally that no one has likely touched or looked at in years.

Moved to Community support area and adjusted tag for proper board identification

There are those of us that spend months working on these things. There is nothing about this that is easy. It is a hobby to waste a lot of time on. If you really wanted to proceed further you are really going to need to hook up to the debug serial port to get an ideal of the boot messages that are occuring. From an earlier post it looks like the serial connection points were identified and hooking up a USB serial adapter to them would give more information. But getting a random TV box working is usually a many month project as a lot needs to be learned about this while environment first.

No, the support for rk3399 is quite good. The problem is that each box/board needs someone to develop a device tree (dtb) for that box/board and each is different depending on the specifics of that box/board. That is what is lacking to support your box. (and if your box has obscure hardware on it, then those drivers may also be lacking)

You are missing something. The boot process starts with the uboot from the emmc (even if ultimately booting the SD card). And coreelec changes the uboot environment of the emmc in ways that are incompatible with with the armbian code. So you need to reflash a fresh android image if you want to use armbian as that will restore the basic state that armbian is expecting.

A google search indicates that the MXQ Pro 4K 5G often uses a RK3229 quad-core CPU

There are probably 20 different CPUs that have cortex a53 (cpus from Allwinner, Rockchip and Amlogic). TV box manufacturers all the time will use different CPUs in TV boxes that have the same external markings. Which ever component is the cheapest at the time of manufacture is what gets used. The only way to really be sure what you have is to look at the chip on the board (but even then there are cases where chip markings have been altered to make you think you have something else). Welcome to the world of TV boxes (and why Armbian doesn't support them officially because they are a mess).

First off, I would recommend using the "psuedo official" instructions from this site: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/33676-installation-instructions-for-tv-boxes-with-amlogic-cpus And there you will find the following warning: Note: If you have previously run other distributions on the box such as coreelec the below installation will not work. You will need to restore the original android firmware before attempting the install. coreelec changes the boot environment in ways that are incompatible with these Armbian builds.

No that is not true. These are not from Armbian. As I said earlier if your eMMC previously had Android (which defines and uses these special partitions) even after a normal Linux repartitioning these will still appear.

What guidance are you trying to follow?

There are various recent reports of windows corrupting the partition table.

How was this transfered? What was on the eMMC before the transfer? Was the eMMC wiped before the transfer? My guess is that your eMMC has Android loaded on it, you didn't wipe it and now you have partitions left over from the Android install.

I have only ever seen mmcblk?boot? Partitions on media that was setup for Android as the A/B is part of how Android installs updates and can fall back to the previous version. I've never seen them on an Armbian created media.