SteeMan

Try a build using a newer edge kernel as a test

You can try different dtbs, different sdcards (older/smaller/slower = more compatible) and potentially a newer or older kernel. These failure to read the sdcard have been occuring more and more recently. No one has had time to reproduce and figure out the cause. I didn't see where you mentioned what build you are using, that would be helpful information

From what I see online that box has an s905 amlogic CPU

What settings have you tried? dtb, uboot?

Armbian does not support the s905x4

I don't think you understand how Armbian works. This board is community supported. It does not and hasn't been an Armbian supported board. Given the hundreds of boards out there Armbian only has the resources to officially support a handful. The rest end up being supported by the user community like this board. Thus support is only as good as the community volunteers who have the board and wish to volunteer their time to support it. Armbian provides the tools and infrastruction to make supporting boards easier, but the work still needs to be done by someone for community supported boards like this.

No it is not.

You are going to need to connect a USB uart connector to capture the console log of the boot. Without logs it is hard to know what is happening

Is your monitor a standard 1080p resolution or something else? If you try a server build that doesn't load a graphical interface does it work? Have you tried something more standard like gnome instead of cinnamon?

What exactly have you installed on the SD card (version, image name), and what steps have you used to install?

What you are reporting is quite common with tv boxes. The case markings often are different than the internals. What is it you are looking for? Your post didn't really ask for anything other than to report that you got a common tv box with internals that differ from the case.

You should also be updating your /etc/apt/sources.list.d/armbian.list as well (otherwise you will be mixing bookworm armbian packages with trixie debian packages)

First off, why do you want to? As the name 'edge' should imply, edge kernels are development kernels that are for testing purposes and may or may not work, and may break at any time. 'current' 6.12 in your case are LTS kernels that should be stable and more suited for non-development/testing use cases. If you do want edge kernels then you can use armbian-config to switch.

Lack of feature implementation, not a bug. 6.1 is the vendor supplied kernel where most things will work, but the vendor doesn't provide support. 6.12 is linux mainline kernel, where much functionality may be missing (as the vendor doesn't work to get their features into mainline linux, but relies on others (volunteer opensource developers) to do their work for them).

Per the install instructions on this site, if you have ever booted a different distribution then your box will be incompatible with the Armbian build. Although it is generally using coreelec builds that will do this. I don't know about the libreelec builds. Also you need to provide a lot more information about what you are doing. There are a number of steps in installing armbian on a TV box and you haven't specified any of the steps you performed. Finally debugging boot issues often requires that you find the debug serial console connection on the board and hook up a usb uart reader to get at the boot messages.

What download are you using? There is no meson-gxm-s912-mecool-bb2-pro.dtb in Armbian builds.

No one has ever submitted this for inclusion in Armbian. This is a community supported board. If anyone were to submit this as a PR it would almost certainly be included as the approval process for community supported boards is a low bar, basically that it doesn't break the build.

Read the instructions from this site. It will tell you that if you have ever booted another os like coreelec, you will have made your box incompatible with the Armbian build.

@pochopsp You would need to use the information in that readme and patch and apply it to a newer u-boot (i.e port the patch to a newer u-boot) and build then a newer u-boot than the 2020.07 currently shipped.

Yeah that won't work as that code has no support for extlinux. The extlinux way would be to add a line FDTOVERLAYS /path/overlayfilename.dtbo to your extlinux.conf file. Again, I haven't tested this, (I've had no overlays that I've needed to use for anything), but theoretically this is supposed to work.

I'm curious what you mean by this. I thought they were working via the extlinux.conf way of specifying them (although I will admit I've never tested this).

Also, did you experiment with this alternative to openvfd?

Did you try doing this with a device tree overlay file instead of editing the device tree? That way on kernel upgrades you shouldn't need to redo the device tree edits each time.

The issue is that your u-boot can't read the emmc. The linux kernel can since when it was run from your sd card you can access the emmc. But after you have copied the install to emmc and then boot, the uboot is reporting it can't read the emmc. There are instruction in /boot/build-u-boot for building the various uboots. I would suggest you try building with a newer version of uboot. What is currently shipped (the u-boot-s905x-s912 was built from uboot 2020-07 sources) so trying with newer uboot 2025-xx might provide better support for your specific emmc.

What CPU does your box have? This should be filed under the corresponding CPU archtecture sub forum.