SteeMan

This design decision has been around from the early days of Armbian and SBC's. If you think about Armbian as a firmware for your board instead of a general operating system like on your PC, that makes some sense as to why originally that would have made the most sense (you install new firmwares, you don't upgrade them in place). Also, all those early boards were limited on the amount of internal emmc storage they may have had, if any, and SD cards were also much smaller in storage capacity at that time. So wasting space with an entire extra kernel wasn't really an option. Now move forward 10 years and most of those limitations are lessened. So it could be supported today for most build targets. But the current approach would likely still be needed for some boards. So while it would be feasible to support having multiple kernels installed it would take a lot of effort to implement (across all the different booting scenarios, u-boot scripts, extlinux, uefi, etc). Also in many of these scenarios it doesn't really help as you need an interactive boot (i.e. with hdmi and keyboard/mouse input) to present a menu to the user to select an alternate boot target, and that interactive boot environment isn't common on SBC's (unlike the PC world). If you have to solder and hookup a USB-UART connector to monitor the debug output to be able to switch your boot kernel, is that better/easier then just popping in a different SD card? So ultimately like a lot in the open source world, this change while possible, hasn't attracted the interest/need for any developer out there to want to undertake this effort. Which leads me to the inevitable next comment, PRs are always welcome for contributions to the project 🙂 (Personally this is something I would also like to see, but in looking into the effort it would take, I know I personally don't have the time to implement, and the workarounds are good enough for me)

I don't think you got the substance of Igor's comments. This board isn't supported by Armbian. It is community supported, which mostly means that is is unsupported unless someone cares enough to submit a PR to make any change/fix/improvements. You saying this or that needs to be done, makes no difference as no one is around to do that work. If you want something improved you either need to submit a PR yourself or pay to have someone do it. Or wait until someone else finds it important enough to do it for you, which may be never.

yes those pins should be the debug uart. I don't have a recommendation on one, but two things to think about, 1) boards will generally either be 3.3v or 5v (so both types exist, although many allow you to switch the voltage with a jumper), if you don't know your voltage start with 3.3v. Then some boards (Rockchip CPUs have a high baud rate that some adapters don't support), which wouldn't be an issue for this amlogic box, but if you might use it in the future for a rockchip based board you might want to make sure yours is capable of those higher speeds.

No. USB isn't available as the board is booting. You need the debug output which early in the boot process is only sent to the debug uart

You we will need to find the debug uart pins on your board, solder connectors to them and connect the usb-uart connector. Some boards come with pins already soldered in place but most don't. It can be difficult to sometimes find the right points as they may not be labeled well.

Booting armbian from SD on this box? Or something else. The way the armbian build works for these amlogic TV boxes is specifically designed to boot from the android uboot on emmc.

The boot process uses the native android uboot on emmc. I have no idea what uboot OSMC uses and if it is compatible with the mechanism that armbian uses to chain from the native uboot to the u-boot.ext. To understand what is happening during the boot you will need to hookup a usb-uart connector to the board and capture the uboot output.

Never heard of this command. What does it do? What do you mean by add it to the boot choice? Have you read and followed the instructions on this site to install to emmc?

What do you mean by that. Please be specific as I don't know what you are referring to.

If you have the android image and the proper amlogic tools, yes.

Never tried an emmc install with CE installed. I have no idea if that will work or not.

Try booting from an SD card, and then try to boot from emmc. I have one box that won't reboot without first doing a boot from SD. But after a boot from an SD card, then it will boot from EMMC correctly.

When you say "doesn't work as expected", what exactly isn't working?

If you are using kernel 6.13 you are using the 'edge' kernel (i.e. development kernel). You likely want to use a 'current' build which will be a 6.12 kernel.

I don't believe this dtb has ever existed in any armbian build. All references I see to it (via web search) are from non-armbian builds. The dtb isn't in the mainline kernel and thus not in the armbian builds. You could try other meson-sm1-* dtbs that do exist and see if any work for your box, or you could grab a dtb from elsewhere and try it with your armbian build (note you will need a dtb compatible with mainline linux, not one for an android linux).

@brentr Isn't it the case that apt upgrade will only download the new u-boot files, but you have to run armbian-config to actually install the new u-boot to your installation media.

In addition to the overlay_prefix what is the value of the overlays parameter in your armbianenv.txt? Perhaps post your entire armbianenv.txt file

I don't know. I do not have that issue with my tx3-mini boxes. You would likely need use a usb uart connector to capture the boot log and report it back here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpVMO7gbnYM 1.2 GHz is the rated clock speed of these CPUs. Some android boxes will overclock or just lie about the speed. I haven't experienced this problem. You will need to provide more details.

I should ask, what image are you working with?

It is in the fat32 partition on the sd card. The issue seems to be that that partition is created in such a way that windows can't see it, even though it is a windows formatted partition.

Please read this first:

moved to the correct forum

This is not an Armbian build. Please do not post information here that isn't about Armbian. Ophub is a fork of Armbian. They use the Armbian name without permission. They do not contribute to Armbian development nor do they participate in these forums. Content related to their work shoud be discussed in their forums not here.

Do you have a non-windows machine to use? There may be an incompatibility with the partition type and windows.

If your emmc isn't working you won't be able to run the aml-s9xx-tvbox Armbian builds. Those builds use the original boxes uboot on emmc to boot from. So you need an intact working emmc with the original android uboot working.