JNC

Im not using armbian, as of now there isnt a distro for the 3328 renegade. Im using the base firefly ubuntu 16.04. The Tinker board is next, just got it> They are not easy to get.....

Simple question then, can a different kernel be loaded by changing the Image file in the fat32 boot partition?

It seems as though a few folks have done it for the tinkerboard (the rt patch) which runs the rockchip kernel( as far as I know) , can anyone confirm this?

Ok, it's been a week of self education. Every attempt at patching the firefly/rockchip kernel with rt preempt fails. It already has some patches in it and it is missing some headers. My understanding is that the generic 4.4 kernel should work on the 3328, can anyone confirm this ? It took copying the 3328 deconfig to the config a file and building a new config, but it compiled and installed. Which brings me back to the boot mess. Aside from getting a Linux kernel building education, I spent some time in The uboot documents, and now I'm more confused then ever. The sd card contains a fat32 partition and an ex4. Mounting the fat 32 ( I used my desktop with Debian) allows the root user to copy files to it, it presently has the image and .dtb file in it. The boot partition can also be seen in the Linux file manager as the boot folder. In both instances they contain the same files. If I copy the Image ( /realtime/Linux/arch/arm64/boot/) file from my newly compiles kernel into the boot partition, both green and red leds lite up, won't boot. Delete it and reinstall original Image , board boots. So..... Is the kernel really in a uboot file or does uboot some how call it out of the / boot folder which happens to have the same contents as the boot partition on the sd card? Any of this make any sense?

Ok, I'd like this also. I found this on git https://github.com/umiddelb/armhf/wiki/Get-more-out-of-"Das-U-Boot" it it seems like uboot can be edited or the boot image sent to a boot.ini file. I have no idea where this would be located . How do we start solving this?

Thank you for the responses. The boot menu i was referring to was like grub. My goal is to simply use my patched real time kernel. I believe it has to be called up by uboot, and its reference is in the boot file.Im new at this and the uboot is kinda overwhelming. I can provide more information. Let me know what you need. we got here by the following; dowloaded the mainline kernel with wget untarred it dowloaded the 4.14r18 preempt patch unzipped it ran the patch with sucess ran menuconfig and set the kernel for fully preemptable saved the config ran make make_install, successfully compiled the patched kernel I just need to tell the system to use the new kernel at boot up, and that is where im stuck. Anyone up for an adventure? This cant be that hard, seems like i need to edit uboot.

Hello, Thank you ahead of time!! I realize there is not an armbian disro for the roc 3328 renegade. It does seem that you all can help with my issue though. I recently patched and compiled a kernel to run real time with the rt preempt. The issue I'm running into is this thing doesn't use grub , so I can't choose the kernel at boot up like a x86 and it doesn't have a config file like a rspi. Is there a way around this ? I'm way out of my comfort zone here. According to what I have read, I need to copy the vmlinuzrt18 to the area where the present kernel is being called now. I admitting find the whole u boot thing confusing. Can anyone help me out? Thanks again