PookyFan

Sorry for late response, I had a long break with my Armbian image creation attempts. I explained it briefly here, as it seems this user had similar problem:

Digging this topic out since I am working on Armbian config for very similar CPU (Allwinner T113-S3) which is supposedly compatible. I came across this thread while looking for info about R528 which, in addition to being separate CPU model, seems to be umbrella term for all T113 family CPUs (at least from the PoV of U-boot). You can create your own board config by adding file in config/boards directory, similar to some of already existing (for example any other Allwinner based board). Since, as I already mentioned, your board's CPU should be compatible with T113-S3, you may try using DTS for a T113 based board - MangoPi MQ - by adding following records to your board's config file: BOARDFAMILY="sun8i" BOOT_FDT_FILE="sun8i-t113s-mangopi-mq-r-t113.dtb" BOOTCONFIG="mangopi_mq_r_defconfig" No promises it would work out of the box (I suppose your board may not have all external peripherals from MangoPi, like WiFi module, so no idea what would happen if it turns out they can't be initialized properly), but I guess it's a good starting point. Ideally you should create your own device tree for your board (looks like there is none in Linux), but using one for MangoPi could get you started somehow. If your board does have LCD connector, your LCD will not work, I can tell you that much now. You need to create device tree patch to add specific panel you're going to use with your board to enable it for Linux. U-boot is another story, I am currently working on adding LCD support in U-boot for my board, but if you're okay with display being usable only after Linux boots, then you should be good with just adding specific panel to Linux DT.

I finally managed to boot completely into my board. The issue was that "current" kernel was lacking device tree for my board, but I was fixing it by copying U-boot compiled DTS file into /boot/dtb (not very smart thing to do, but it allowed me to load kernel, so I thought it was fine). Looks like further down the road lack of proper device tree was making itself more and more obvious, as, for example, init would fail to mount root filesystem. I managed to get to know about it by logging directly into /dev/kmsg, as it was the only way I could log anything at all. I guess that was, again, because of lack of proper DTS for UART. So then I tried with "edge" kernel again, although I had to go back to 6.4.1 in order to make any progress, as I'm still not sure why the newest kernel is stuck during boot at the point it it stuck. Well, 6.4.1 was also stuck, but somewhere else and this time I was able to troubleshoot it - it turned out it didn't stuck, it just tried to switch from early console to "true" ttyS0 device. This was problematic, because default serial console output used by U-boot was on UART3, but it was named ttyS0. So when kernel started to attach UARTs, UART0 was connedted with ttyS0 and UART3 was no longer fed with logs., as it was (probably) connedted to ttyS3 instead I'm not sure why adding ttyS3 console to kernel cmdline didn't help, but oh well. So for now the workaround is to delete all UART devices from DTS, except for UART3, which is now named UART0. This did the trick and upon switching from early console to ttyS0, kernel managed to keep logging its output, and then also init and rest of the system was able to use this serial console. Great success! Now, I have two other problems to solve: - why kernels newer than 6.4.1 is stuck during booting process? - how can I avoid UART3 <-> ttyS0 mismatch without deleting all other UART devices from DTS? (Some additional serial could be handy, allright) ok turns out forcing ttyS3 instead of ttyS0 in boot.scr helped but I will be working on them from now on. If someone has suggestions, please share, it may make my life easier. :3

Not sure if this should go in this section, but since my problem is about non-supported board, then I guess... I found out about Armbian only recently and decided to give it a try for my T113-S3 based board I bought on Aliexpress. It looks like it's some kind of a MangoPi MQ clone, at least judging by schematics. I managed to create a new configuration for my board, together with required U-Boot patches. I built two images, for "current" and "edge" kernel. For some time I was under impression that Linux doesn't boot at all (serial console output was stuck at "Starting kernel ..."), until I added earlycon=on to armbianEnv.txt. Then I finally saw some output from kernel being booted. But at some point it looks like it's stuck, or just doesn't show login prompt? It's hard to say. Logs from the "current" image look like this: Logs from "edge" image don't even come to that point: What could be wrong, or what could I be forgetting to set? I'd be grateful for any help, especially knowing that this board is not either officially nor unofficially supported. EDIT: I might have not been precise enough, I'm trying to login through serial console since I can't connect any screen to my board at the moment. I guess the lack of login prompt might be connected to this: "Warning: unable to open an initial console". It is connected with /dev/console device file, which might be needed for the serial console to work in userspace. I tried to track the warning down by adding some debug logs into kernel code and what I confirmed: - /dev/console device is created successfully - at the same time, while opening it (from within the kernel), open operation fails with ENODEV error What's going on?