stroma

Hi team, This is not exactly Armbian related, however I hope to find some help here, also it can be useful for someone else in custom board development (my case). For testing I have Olimex RK3328-SOM-EVB and RK3318 TV box boards. They both behave the same way. As summary I'm trying to boot Linux using the Bootrom and USB OTG only, in other words without any external boot NVM attached. To archive this I build U-Boot SPL (u-boot-spl.bin), which support SDP protocol via USB OTG. For SDP file transfer I'm using imx_usb tool. The binaries used in the process are: rk3328_uboot_v1.19.250.bin - consists of u-boot-tpl.bin and u-boot-spl.bin created with boot_merger tool. u-boot.itb - FIT image (ATF, u-boot.bin and dtb), mainline U-Boot v2023.10 kernel.itb - FIT image (Image.gz and dtb), mainline kernel v6.1 I also prepared a proper sdcard image, from above binaries and wrote it to an SD card. My test setup consists of two booting paths, note the binaries in both are the same: With boot path 1, u-boot-tpl, u-boot-spl loaded via USB OTG: RK3328 in Mask ROM mode, SD card removed rkdeveloptool db rk3328_uboot_v1.19.250.bin insert SD card imx_usb - u-boot.itb boot kernel from U-boot prompt: setenv bootargs root=/dev/mmcblk1p2 console=ttyS2,1500000 earlycon ro rootwait; mmc dev 1; load mmc 1 0x800800 kernel.itb; bootm 0x800800 With boot path 2, u-boot-tpl, u-boot-spl loaded from SD card: insert SD card, power on (or reset) the board imx_usb - u-boot.itb boot kernel from U-boot prompt: setenv bootargs root=/dev/mmcblk1p2 console=ttyS2,1500000 earlycon ro rootwait; mmc dev 1; load mmc 1 0x800800 kernel.itb; bootm 0x800800 The overall description of two boot paths is as follow: boot path 1: rk3328_uboot_v1.19.250.bin (bootrom via OTG)-+ +- -> uboot.itb (imx_usb) -> kernel.itb (from SD card) boot path 2: rk3328_uboot_v1.19.250.bin (bootrom via SD) -+ The issues I have: When the SoC is booted through boot path 1 the kernel hangs soon after starting ... [ 0.016620] smp: Bringing up secondary CPUs ... If boot path 2 is used - The kernel boots and everything works as expected. The Bootrom in RK3318/28 first tries eMMC, SPI NOR, SPI NAND and SD card, if those boot devices failed then USB OTG is used for booting. Since the only difference between two boot paths is the way the TPL/SPL is loaded from the Bootrom - USB OTG or SD card, the only logical explanation I can think of is that there is some "leftover" in SoC state after OTG boot, which causes the kernel to hang. Does anyone have any idea how I can narrow down and eventually find the cause for this issue?

@Aurelio: Yes I used method described in the youtube video above. You will need serial cable connection to the PCB and adb. The 4 pin connector on the PCB is used for the serial connection. Cheap USB<->Serial converter can be used, note the voltage level of the signals is 3V3 (only GND, RX and TX pins are needed), serial speed is 115200 bps. I can't say much about the performance compared to RPi. Since the armbian filesystem is on USB 2.0 flash the file operations are rather slow. I successfully installed OctoPrint with web camera support and it seems to fork fine. I still not try to write the image to internal eMMC, I want to be able to backup the stock android and have a method to restore it if needed. For now I backed up the eMMC content with dd if=/dev/mmcblk1 iflag=fullblock oflag=direct bs=512k | gzip > tvbox-backup.img.gz but I'm not sure if this file is useful. Edit: armbianmonitor result

Yes, @Aurelio, it was proudly advertised as 4GB RAM, 64GB eMMC version. I know it was a scam before I buy it. To be honest I expected to get 1G/8G 🙂 However, good luck with the refund.

I managed to boot Armbian image from a usb flash drive. It seems I have 800MB RAM and 3GB eMMC 🙂 root@armbian:~# free -m total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 803 163 127 4 512 559 Swap: 401 0 401 [ INFO ] The device name: [ Amlogic Meson GXL (S905X) P212 Development Board ] [ INFO ] The device eMMC name: [ /dev/mmcblk2 ] [ INFO ] The device eMMC size: [ 3GB ]