hipboi

With Armbian v20.11 one can write mainline u-boot image to board's SPI and enjoy booting nvme drives without any mmc devices.
Prerequisities: ROCK Pi 4(A/B/C) v1.4 or 1.3 with SPI soldered in (v1.3 comes without SPI flash from the factory).
 
If you already have Radxa's u-boot written to SPI you need to short pins 23 and 25 for Armbian to boot Boot fresh image of Armbian v20.11.x for ROCK Pi 4(A/B/C) Add the following lines to /boot/armbianEnv.txt overlays=spi-jedec-nor param_spinor_spi_bus=1 Reboot If you shorted 23-25 pins in 1.) then: disconnect them after the ROCK Pi 4 fully boot's  enable spi-nor by executing (as root):
echo spi1.0 > /sys/bus/spi/drivers/spi-nor/bind verify that the SPI mtd interface is enabled by running
ls /dev/mtdblock0 if the last command does not list any file then something went wrong between 3.) and 5.) Run nand-sata-install choose option: "Boot from SPI - system on SATA, USB or NVMe" choose NVMe partition, eg. /dev/nvme0n1p1 accept erasing of the choosen partition with "Yes" choose fs type (tested with ext4) wait a few minutes for rootfs transfer to chosen partition choose writing SPI bootloader with "Yes" confirm that you want to flash it with "Yes" wait ~60 seconds for writing choose Exit Reboot Enjoy Armbian booting with SPI / NVMe  
Why bother with mainline u-boot?
It is known to boot some NVMe drives that legacy u-boot from Radxa has issues with, eg. SAMSUNG 970 EVO Plus and SAMSUNG PM981.
This does not mean that all NVMe drives are supported, YMMV.
 
Which NVMe drives are known to be working?
Corsair MP510 240GB/480GB/960GB
Gigabyte SSD M.2 2280 PCIe x2 Model:GP-GSM2NE8128GNTD
HP SSD EX900 M.2 NVMe 120GB. Model: 2YY42AA#ABB
Intel SSD 660p Model:SSDPEKNW512GB
Kingston A1000 SSD 240GB (PHISON PS5008-E8-10)
Kingston A2000 M.2 2280 PCIe NVMe
PNY 250GB XLR8 CS3030 M.2 NVMe SSD PCIe Gen3 x4
Sabrent Rocket 256GB NVMe PCIe M.2 2280
Samsung 970 EVO Plus SSD 250GB M.2 2280, PCIe 3.0 x4, NVMe, 3500/2300 MB/s
Samsung PM981 256GB
XPG SX6000 Lite 128GB (ASX6000LNP-128GT-C)
 
Why not using Radxa's u-boot SPI image?
Ambian's u-boot configuration is incompatible with Radxa's SPI image
 
Why Armbian is using u-boot that is incompatible with Radxa's?
It uses mainline u-boot with Open Source TPL/SPL/proper and BL31 from Rockchip packaged into u-boot and we may switch to using open source ATF instead of the BL31 in the future.
 
Can I boot Radxa's images with Armbian's u-boot written to SPI?
Yes. Armbian's SPI u-boot is compatible with Radxa's images available here: https://github.com/radxa/rock-pi-images-released/releases
It may not be compatible with some older images (released before July 2020) because of the device tree filename change.

https://github.com/armbian/build/pull/2129

I think there is some misunderstanding here. Last time we checked, radxa u-boot in SPI with Armbian in NVMe can boot, with MBR. Maybe some boot order change in u-boot caused this? We will look into it.

I have added SPI workaround to the radxa eMMC install wiki page:
https://wiki.radxa.com/Rockpi4/install/eMMC
 
Btw: I am wondering why Armbian isn't using GUID partition table. Was GUID partition table not working on older Radxa ?

Legacy and mainline kernel.
 
https://www.armbian.com/rock-pi-4/

I prepared (last weekend? - don't remember anymore) a first step towards a merge of rk3399 (currently nanopi boards) with rockchip64 (more or less all the rest) so that both can be covered fully under one boardfamily (rockchip64). Patches are adjusted and dts support for nanopis in ayufans kernel is done as well.
 
https://github.com/chwe17/build/tree/rk3399merge
 
I would happily give it into 'someone others' hands cause time in the next month might be really rare.
 
Basically it needs testing on the boards which got newly merged into rockchip64 (don't own any nanopi *4 board so I can't test it). And probably a small helper script to adjust the 'living' boards config so that they'll get updates in the future from their new boardfamily (this might be tricky and needs for sure a lot of testing, to ensure we don't break them)
 
Would be nice if someone can review it and test it on the nanopis

Kever Yang from Rockchip told me they will eventually upstream the DDR4 support in u-boot. We need to wait for some time.

You can release it. We will polish the schematic formats and release it anyway...

Thanks for pointing it out. I will have out engineer look at it and clean the device tree. We would like to contribute to Armbian and get some decent support on ROCk Pi 4. Apparently, we should do it in the right way.

You can release it. We will polish the schematic formats and release it anyway...

Thanks for pointing it out. I will have out engineer look at it and clean the device tree. We would like to contribute to Armbian and get some decent support on ROCk Pi 4. Apparently, we should do it in the right way.

The radxa people is working on Armbian support for this board. I think it will be soon to have Armbian on ROCK Pi 4.

The radxa people is working on Armbian support for this board. I think it will be soon to have Armbian on ROCK Pi 4.

@tkaiser I did not forget it. We update ficus to v1.1 adding some requests from customers and now it's out. We will send you the new boards soon after some testing.