Osiris

I have several rock64, rpi, and opi boards but only one ftdi232 serial adapter. Since not each board has hdmi output or in some cases it is buggy a serial connection is the only way for me to see what's going on. If I remove the adapter from a running board and plug it in immediately again I still get serial output, however, if I plug it in after a while I don't get any output. Any ideas what could be the reason and how to fix this?

Has anyone here tested the Rock64 successfully with an u-boot version which is not the one from ayufan? I did not have much luck with the rk3328 default config and mainline u-boot when I tried it a while back. The same is true when I tried to use the board config from ayufan with mainline u-boot. The version by ayufan is working in principle but also is rather dated as far as I know and therefore does not support some newer features. Anyone knows if the version from ayufan will be bumped or has a working config for a more recent u-boot version?

I'm not sure about the current state. But images from maybe 1-2 weeks ago did not work for me as well as images from several months ago. So up to now there was no version which worked. I'm maybe going to test the images from time to time but my focus will be more on some custom debian builds or other operating systems. Edit: Since the problem occurs before the kernel boots it is likely u-boot related. So you could ask on the u-boot mailing list or irc or maybe on the official pine64/rock64 forum. I guess the version is still the one from ayufan so you could maybe also ask him. From what I understand the pine64 armbian image works on the rock64 1gb version. If you could figure out the differences maybe you could find a hint on why the official rock64 version fails.

I also can confirm this issue with the 1GB version. The boards work fine, but not with recent armbian images.

I'm looking for current and upcoming PXE bootable SBCs. I guess if it has uboot on a SPI chip (like ROCK64, PINE64, espressobin, opi r1 ...) this is already a good indicator that it will support PXE boot. But I'm not 100% sure if PXE will really work, it seems to be rarely used for such boards. The only board I know which does not have uboot but can boot via PXE is the rpi 3. Maybe there are other ones. Some other boards like the nanopi duo could boot via a SPI chip attached to the respective GPIO pins. Maybe someone here knows other boards with PXE boot support or has tested it already?