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DISCLAIMER (PLEASE READ): everything you can find in this thread (binaries, texts, code snippets, etc...) are provided AS-IS and are not part of official Armbian project. For this reason not people from Armbian project nor myself are responsible for misuse or loss of functionality of hardware. Please don't ask about support or assistance in other non-community forums nor in the official Armbian github repository, instead post your questions in this thread, in the TV Boxes forum section (hardware related) or in the Peer-to-peer support section (general linux/software related). Thank you! Following the recent thread on LibreElec forum about an unofficial image for rk3229 devices, I would like to make public the work made by me and @fabiobassa about bringing rk322x support to armbian. The project is now in -> mainline Armbian <- and the development fork will be available on github -> here <- Most of the love has been poured into supporting and bringing up the legacy rockchip 4.4 kernel, but in the near future the goal is to fully support the mainline kernel. What works: Should boot and work flawlessy on all boards with RK3228a, RK3228b and RK3229, with either DDR2 and DDR3 memories. Mainline u-boot OPTEE provided as Trusted Execution Environment All 4 cores are working Ethernet Serial UART (configured at 115200 bps, not 1.5Mbps!) Thermals and frequency scaling OTG USB 2.0 port (also as boot device!) EHCI/OHCI USB 2.0 ports MMC subsystem (including eMMC, SD and sdio devices) Hardware video acceleration (fully supported via RKMPP on legacy kernel, partial support via hantro kernel driver on mainline) NAND is available only on legacy kernel. To fully boot from NAND, use the Multitool and its steP-nand installation (instructions are below) Various WIFI over SDIO are supported (SSV6051P, SSV6256P, ESP8089, Realtek chips, etc...), but ssv6x5x drivers are available only on legacy kernel Full GPU acceleration on legacy kernel, mainline kernel has lima driver compiled in but X11 is very slow - you are still free to compile and install mali kernel driver on mainline yourself. U-boot boot order priority: first the sdcard, then the USB OTG port and eventually the internal eMMC; you can install u-boot (and the whole system) in the internal eMMC and u-boot will always check for images on external sdcard/USB first. Unbrick: Technically, rockchip devices cannot be bricked. If the internal flash does not contain a bootable system, they will always boot from the sdcard. If, for a reason, the bootable system on the internal flash is corrupted or is unable to boot correctly, you can always force the maskrom mode shorting the eMMC clock pin on the PCB. Here there is the procedure, but you can also google around if you get stuck on a faulty bootloader, the technique is pretty simple and requires a simple screwdriver. There are however some unfortunate cases (expecially newer boards) where shorting the eMMC clock pin is difficult or impossibile, like eMMC or eMCP BGA chips with no exposed pins. In those cases pay double attention when burning something on the internal eMMC/eMCP and always test first the image from the sdcard to be sure it works before burning anything on eMMC/eMCP NAND vs eMMC vs eMCP difference: RK3228 and RK3229 tv boxes comes with three different flash memory chips: eMMC, NAND and eMCP. It does not depend upon the market name of the tv box and neither the internal board; manufacturers put whatever they find cheaper when they buy the components. NAND chip is just the non-volatile memory eMMC chip contains both the non-volatile memory plus a controller. eMCP chip contains the non-volatile memory, a controller for the non-volatile memory (like eMMC), but also contains a bank of DDR SDRAM memory on the same physical chip. The difference is very important, because eMMC and eMCP are far easier to support at various levels: the controller deals with the physical characteristics of the non-volatile memory, so the software has no to deal with. NAND chips instead are harder to support, because the software is required to deal with the physical characteristics and non-standard things that depends upon the NAND manufacturer. If you have a NAND chips you're unlucky because mainline kernel currently cannot access it, but also because you need special care and instructions explained later. eMCP chips at the moment are not supported by stable images, do not burn Armbian image on eMCP internal flash or you risk of bricking the boards! Instead follow the "Boot from sdcard" procedure and post on the forum the results of armbianmonitor -u command for further help and possibly a customized image. You can discover if you have a NAND, eMMC or eMCP chip looking on the board are reading the signature on the flash memory chip. The Multitool (see later) also can detect which chip you have onboard: the program will warn you at startup if you have a NAND chip. NAND bootloader upgrade: IMPORTANT: don't do this is you have an eMMC or eMCP; skip this paragraph if you are unsure too! For fearless and bold people who wants to get all the things up-to-date, or are having issues booting images, there is the chance to upgrade the bootloader on NAND. The NAND bootloader is nothing else than a regular idbloader (see official rockchip documentation) but contains some bits to correctly access the data on your flash memory. Upgrading requires to erase the existing flash content, in the worst case will require you to follow the Unbrick procedure above or restore an older but more compatible bootloader. If you are not mentally ready to overcome possible further issues, don't do this! After the disclaimer above, there are some benefits although: You run the most recent rockchip blob code (ddrbin + miniloader) You will probably solve the reboot issue that some users with NAND memories are having Boards with DDR2 memories are booted at 330 MHz, so you may get a bit of improvement because older bootloaders boot them at 300 Mhz or 330 Mhz Boards with DDR3 memories are booted at 660 Mhz, here you get quite an improvement because older bootloaders boot them at 300 Mhz or 330 Mhz The detailed instructions and the binaries are available at this post Multimedia: If you need multimedia features, like OpenGL/OpenGL ES acceleration, hardware accelerated Kodi, ffmpeg and mpv you can take a look to this post An effective tutorial from @Hai Nguyen on how to configure a box as a hi-quality music player using an USB audio card, and controlling it via remote control is available in this post Installation (via SD card): Building: You can build your own image follow the common steps to build armbian for other tv boxes devices: when you are in the moment to choose the target board, switch to CSC/TVB/EOL boards and select "rk322x-box" from the list. Stable images: Stable images are certified and signed by Armbian and you have the guarantee to get the system updates when there is a new Armbian release. Images and installation instructions are provided in the Armbian RK322x download page: https://www.armbian.com/rk322x-tv-box/ Development images: No development images for now, please download the stable images directly from above. Multitool: Multitool - A small but powerful image for RK322x TV Box maintenance Quick installation instructions on eMMC: Build or download your preferred Armbian image and a copy of the Multitool; Burn the Multitool on an SD card; once done, place the Armbian image in images folder of the SD card FAT partition; Plug the SD card in the TV box and plug in the power cord. After some seconds the blue led starts blinking and the Multitool appears; OPTIONAL: you can do a backup of the existing firmware with "Backup flash" menu option; Choose "Burn image to flash" from the menu, then select the destination device (usually mmcblk2) and the image to burn; Wait for the process to complete, then choose "Shutdown" from main menu; Unplug the power cord and the SD card, then replug the power cord; Wait for 10 seconds, then the led should start blinking and HDMI will turn on. The first time the boot process will take a couple of minutes or more because the filesystem is going to be resized, so be patient and wait for the login prompt. On first boot you will be asked for entering a password for root user of your choice and the name and password for a regular user Run sudo rk322x-config and select your board characteristics to enable leds, wifi chips, high-speed eMMC, etc... Run armbian-config to configure timezone, locales and other personal options Congratulations, Armbian is now installed! Despite the procedure above is simple and reliable, I always recommend to first test that your device boots Armbian images from SD Card. Due to the really large hardware variety, there is the rare chance that the images proposed here may not boot. If a bad image is burned in eMMC, the box may not boot anymore forcing you to follow the unbrick section at the top of this post. Quick installation instructions on NAND: Build or download your preferred Armbian image and a copy of the Multitool; Burn the Multitool on an SD card; once done, place the Armbian legacy kernel image in images folder of the SD card FAT partition; Plug the SD card in the TV box and plug in the power cord. After some seconds the blue led starts blinking and the Multitool appears; OPTIONAL: you can do a backup of the existing firmware with "Backup flash" menu option; Choose "Burn Armbian image via steP-nand" from the menu, then select the destination device (usually rknand0) and the image to burn; Wait for the process to complete, then choose "Shutdown" from main menu; Unplug the power cord and the SD card, then replug the power cord; Wait for 10 seconds, then the led should start blinking and HDMI will turn on. The first time the boot process will take a couple of minutes or more because the filesystem is going to be resized, so be patient and wait for the login prompt. On first boot you will be asked for entering a password for root user of your choice and the name and password for a regular user Run sudo rk322x-config and select your board characteristics to enable leds, wifi chips, etc... Run armbian-config to configure timezone, locales and other personal options Congratulations, Armbian is now installed! Alternative: you can install the bootloader in NAND and let it boot from SD Card or USB: Download a copy of the Multitool and burn it on an SD card; Plug the SD card in the TV box and plug in the power cord. After some seconds the blue led starts blinking and the Multitool appears; RECOMMENDED: make a backup of the existing firmware with "Backup flash" menu option; Choose "Install Jump Start for Armbian" menu option: the Jump Start uses the internal NAND to boot from external SD Card or external USB Stick; Follow the general instructions to boot from SD Card below, skip the first erase eMMC step. Quick installation instructions to boot from SD Card: If you are already running Armbian from eMMC, skip to the next step. Instead if you are running the original firmware you need to first erase the internal eMMC; to do so download the Multitool, burn it on an SD Card, plug the SD Card and power the TV Box. Use "Backup flash" if you want to do a backup of the existing firmware, then choose "Erase flash" menu option. Build or download your preferred Armbian image; Uncompress and burn the Armbian image on the SD Card; Plug the SD Card in the TV Box and power it on; Wait for 10 seconds, then the led should start blinking and HDMI will turn on. The first time the boot process will take a couple of minutes or more because the filesystem is going to be resized, so be patient and wait for the login prompt; On first boot you will be asked for entering a password for root user of your choice and the name and password for a regular user Run sudo rk322x-config and select your board characteristics to enable leds, wifi chips, high-speed eMMC or NAND, etc... Run armbian-config to configure timezone, locales and other personal options, or also to transfer the SD Card installation to internal eMMC; Congratulations, Armbian is running from SD Card! A note about boot device order: With Armbian also comes mainline U-boot. If you install Armbian or just the bootloader in the eMMC or the Jump Start on internal NAND, the bootloader will look for valid bootable images in this order: External SD Card External USB Stick in OTG Port Internal eMMC Installation (without SD card, board with eMMC): If you have no sd card slot and your board has an eMMC, you can burn the armbian image directly on the internal eMMC using rkdeveloptool and a male-to-male USB cable: Download your preferred Armbian image from Armbian download page and decompress it. Download the rk322x bootloader: rk322x_loader_v1.10.256.bin Download a copy of rkdeveloptool: a compiled binary is available in the official rockchip-linux rkbin github repository. Unplug the power cord from the tv box Plug an end of an USB Male-to-male cable into the OTG port (normally it is the lone USB port on the same side of the Ethernet, HDMI, analog AV connectors) while pressing the reset microbutton with a toothpick. You can find the reset microbutton in a hole in the back of the box, but sometimes it is hidden into the AV analog jack Plug the other end of the USB Male-to-male cable into an USB port of your computer If everything went well, run lsusb: you should see a device with ID 2207:320b Run sudo rkdeveloptool rd 3 (if this fails don't worry and proceed to next step) Run sudo rkdeveloptool db rk322x_loader_v1.10.256.bin Run sudo rkdeveloptool wl 0x0 image.img (change image.img this with the real Armbian image filename) Unplug the power cord Done! Installation (without SD card, board with NAND): If you are in the unfortunate case you can't use an SD card for installation and your board has a NAND chip, you still have an option to use the quick Multitool installation steps via USB. Obtain a copy of rkdeveloptool: a compiled binary is available in the official rockchip-linux rkbin github repository. Unplug the power cord from the tv box Plug an end of an USB Male-to-male cable into the OTG port (normally it is the lone USB port on the same side of the Ethernet, HDMI, analog AV connectors) while pressing the reset microbutton with a toothpick. You can find the reset microbutton in a hole in the back of the box, but sometimes it is hidden into the AV analog jack Plug the other end of the USB Male-to-male cable into an USB port of your computer If everyting went well, using lsusb you should see a device with ID 2207:320b Run sudo rkdeveloptool wl 0x4000 u-boot-main.img (download u-boot-main.img.xz , don't forget to decompress it!) Unplug the power cord Now you can follow the instructions on how to install on eMMC/NAND via SD card, just use instead an USB stick to do all the operations and plug it into the USB OTG port. Once you reboot, USB OTG port will be used as a boot device. NOTE: NAND users without SD slot may be unhappy to know that it will be difficult to do extra maintenance with Multitool in case something breaks in the installed Armbian system: installing u-boot-main.img makes the installed system unbootable because it is missing the NAND driver. Alternative backup, restore and erase flash for EXPERTS: These backup, restore and erase flash procedures are for experts only. They are kept here mostly for reference, since the Multitool is perfectly able to do same from a very comfy interface and is the suggested way to do maintenance. Backup: Obtain a copy of rkdeveloptool: a compiled binary is available in the official rockchip-linux rkbin github repository. If you prefer, you can compile it yourself from the sources available at official rockchip repository Unplug the power cord from the tv box Plug an end of an USB Male-to-male cable into the OTG port (normally it is the lone USB port on the same side of the Ethernet, HDMI, analog AV connectors) while pressing the reset microbutton with a toothpick. You can find the reset microbutton in a hole in the back of the box, but sometimes it is hidden into the AV analog jack Plug the other end of the USB Male-to-male cable into an USB port of your computer If everyting went well, using lsusb you should see a device with ID 2207:320b change directory and move into rkbin/tools directory, run ./rkdeveloptool rfi then take note of the FLASH SIZE megabytes (my eMMC is 8Gb, rkdeveloptool reports 7393 megabytes) run ./rkdeveloptool rl 0x0 $((FLASH_SIZE * 2048)) backup.data (change FLASH_SIZE with the value you obtained the step before) once done, the internal eMMC is backed up to backup.data file Restore: first we have to restore the original bootloader, then restore the original firmware. Running rkdeveloptool with these switches will accomplish both the jobs: ./rkdeveloptool db rk322x_loader_v1.10.256.bin Downloading bootloader succeeded. ./rkdeveloptool ul rk322x_loader_v1.10.256.bin Upgrading loader succeeded. ./rkdeveloptool wl 0x0 backup.data Write LBA from file (100%) Download here: rk322x_loader_v1.10.256.bin Erase the flash memory: clearing the internal eMMC/NAND memory makes the SoC look for external SD Card as first boot option. If there isn't any suitable SD Card, the SoC enters maskrom mode, which can then be used for full eMMC/NAND access using rkdeveloptool. This is perfectly fine if your box has an eMMC flash memory. NOTE: In case you have a NAND flash memory this option is however discouraged. The original bootloader contains some special parameters to correctly access the data. Clearing the flash memory will probably garbage the NAND data and restoring the bootloader may require some special instructions. Obtain a copy of rkdeveloptool: a compiled binary is available in the official rockchip-linux rkbin github repository. If you prefer, you can compile it yourself from the sources available at official rockchip repository Unplug the power cord from the board Plug an end of an USB Male-to-male cable into the OTG port (normally it is the lone USB port on the same side of the Ethernet, HDMI, analog AV connectors) while pressing the reset microbutton with a toothpick. You can find the reset microbutton in a hole in the back of the box, but sometimes it is hidden into the AV analog jack Plug the other end of the USB Male-to-male cable into an USB port of your computer If everyting went well, using lsusb you should see a device with ID 2207:320b run ./rkdeveloptool ef and wait a few seconds once done, the internal eMMC is erased and the device will boot from the sdcard from now on Critics, suggestions and contributions are welcome! Credits: @fabiobassa for his ideas, inspiration, great generosity in giving the boards for development and testing. The project of bringing rk322x into armbian would not have begun without his support! Justin Swartz, for his work and research to bring mainline linux on rk3229 (repository here) @knaerzche for his great contribution to libreelec support and mainline patches @Alex83 for his patience in testing the NAND bootloader upgrade procedure on his board

­DISCLAIMER (PLEASE READ): everything you can find in this thread (binaries, texts, code snippets, etc...) are provided AS-IS and are not part of official Armbian project. For this reason not people from Armbian project nor myself are responsible for misuse or loss of functionality of hardware. Please don't ask about support or assistance in other non-community forums nor in the official Armbian github repository, instead post your questions in this thread, in the TV Boxes forum section (hardware related) or in the Peer-to-peer support section (general linux/software related). Thank you! This thread is to give stable and mature long-term range support to rk3318/rk3328 found in many tv boxes in Armbian project as Community Supported Configuration (CSC). The current work is in early stages, it may or may not work for you; if and when it will be considered mature enough, it will be hopefully merged into Armbian master, but in the meantime it lives on my personal fork on github -> here <- Important notes: is just a personal opinion, but apparently widely supported, that rk3318 chip is not an official rockchip part. They probably are scrap rk3328 parts which have not passed conformance tests but are sold anyway to tv boxes manufacturers. They don’t reach the same operating frequency of the rk3328, have much higher leakage currents (and thus higher temperatures) and often the boards they are installed on are low quality with low quality components, in fact a very very common issue is the eMMC failure due to bad parts and bad soldering. So said, I personally suggest not to buy any rk3318 tv box, but instead find a properly supported SBC (Single Board Computer) if you need a reliable product. In the unfortunate case you already have such product, this thread may help you have some fun with them. What works: • Works on RK3318 and RK3328 TV boxes with DDR3 memories • Mainline u-boot • Mainline ATF provided as Trusted Execution Environment • All 4 cores are working • Ethernet • Serial UART (configured at stock 1.5Mbps) • Thermals and frequency scaling • OTG USB 2.0 port (also as boot device!) • EHCI/OHCI USB 2.0 ports • MMC subsystem (including , SD and sdio devices) • Hardware video acceleration (fully supported via RKMPP on legacy kernel, support via hantro and rkvdec kernel driver on mainline) • Various WIFI over SDIO are supported • Full acceleration on legacy kernel and mainline kernel. Mainline has lima driver compiled in but X11 is albeit slow - you are still free to compile and install mali kernel driver on mainline yourself. • U-boot boot order priority: first the sdcard, then the USB OTG port and eventually the internal ; you can install u-boot (and the whole system) in the internal and u-boot will always check for images on external sdcard/USB first. Unbrick: Technically, rockchip devices cannot be bricked. If the internal flash does not contain a bootable system, they will always boot from the sdcard. If, for a reason, the bootable system on the internal flash is corrupted or is unable to boot correctly, you can always force the maskrom mode shorting the clock pin on the PCB. Here there is the procedure (for rk322x, but on rk3318 is the same), but you can also google around if you get stuck on a faulty bootloader, the technique is pretty simple and requires a simple screwdriver. There are however some unfortunate cases where shorting the clock pin is difficult or impossibile, like BGA chips with no exposed pins. In those cases pay double attention when burning something on the internal flash memory and always test first the image booting from the sdcard to be sure it works before burning anything in internal flash. This is a list of posts where forum users have been able to spot the eMMC clock pin to trigger the maskrom mode: Ninkbox N1 Max RK3318 by @enigmasphinx Partecipation and debugging: If you want to partecipate or need help debugging issues, do not hesitate to share your experience with the installation procedure of the boxes. In case of issues and missed support, provide as many as possible of these things is very useful to try and bring support for an unsupported board: upload the device tree binary (dtb) of your device. We can understand a lot of things of the hardware from that small piece of data; dmesg and other logs (use armbianmonitor -u that automatically collects and uploads the logs online) attach a serial converter to the device and provide the output of the serial port; a link to the original firmware (you can do a full backup with the Multitool); some photos of both sides of the board. Some details of the eMMC, DDR and Wifi chips are also useful Multimedia: If you need multimedia features, like OpenGL/OpenGL ES acceleration, hardware accelerated Kodi, ffmpeg and mpv you can take a look to this post Installation (via SD card): Building: You can build your own image follow the common steps to build armbian for other tv boxes devices: when you are in the moment to choose the target board, switch to /TVB/ boards and select "rk3318-box" from the list. Development images: Armbian 21.11 - Debian Bullseye minimal - mainline kernel 5.10.68 - Download from here - Build date: 2021-09-24 Armbian 21.11 - Ubuntu Hirsute desktop [xfce] - mainline kernel 5.10.68 - Download from here - Build date: 2021-09-24 Armbian 21.05 - Debian Buster minimal - legacy kernel 4.4.213 - Download from here - Build date: 2021-04-16 Multitool: Multitool - A small but powerful image for RK3318/RK3328 TV Box maintenance. Download it from here Quick installation instructions on eMMC: Build or download your preferred Armbian image and a copy of the Multitool; Burn the Multitool on an SD card; once done, place the Armbian image in images folder of the SD card FAT partition; Plug the SD card in the TV box and plug in the power cord. After some seconds the blue led starts blinking and the Multitool appears; OPTIONAL: you can do a backup of the existing firmware with "Backup flash" menu option; Choose "Burn image to flash" from the menu, then select the destination device (usually mmcblk2) and the image to burn; Wait for the process to complete, then choose "Shutdown" from main menu; Unplug the power cord and the SD card, then replug the power cord; Wait for 10 seconds, then the led should start blinking and HDMI will turn on. The first time the boot process will take a couple of minutes or more because the filesystem is going to be resized, so be patient and wait for the login prompt. On first boot you will be asked for entering a password for root user of your choice and the name and password for a regular user Run rk3318-config to configure the board specific options Run armbian-config to configure timezone, locales and other personal options Congratulations, Armbian is now installed! Despite the procedure above is simple and reliable, I always recommend to first test that your device boots Armbian images from SD Card. Due to the really large hardware variety, there is the rare chance that the images proposed here may not boot. If a bad image is burned in , the box may not boot anymore forcing you to follow the unbrick section at the top of this post. Quick installation instructions to boot from SD Card: If you are already running Armbian from eMMC, skip to the next step. Instead if you are running the original firmware you need to first erase the internal; to do so download the Multitool, burn it on an SD Card, plug the SD Card and power the TV Box. Use "Backup flash" if you want to do a backup of the existing firmware, then choose "Erase flash" menu option. Build or download your preferred Armbian image; Uncompress and burn the Armbian image on the SD Card; Plug the SD Card in the TV Box and power it on; Wait for 10 seconds, then the led should start blinking and HDMI will turn on. The first time the boot process will take a couple of minutes or more because the filesystem is going to be resized, so be patient and wait for the login prompt; On first boot you will be asked for entering a password for root user of your choice and the name and password for a regular user Run rk3318-config to configure the board specific options Run armbian-config to configure timezone, locales and other personal options, or also to transfer the SD Card installation to internal ; Congratulations, Armbian is running from SD Card! A note about boot device order: With Armbian also comes mainline U-boot. If you install Armbian, the bootloader will look for valid bootable images in this order: External SD Card External USB Stick in OTG Port Internal Critics, suggestions and contributions are welcome! Credits: • @fabiobassa for his ideas, inspiration, great generosity in giving the boards for development and testing. The project of bringing rk3318 into armbian would not have begun without his support! • @hexdump for his precious support in early testing, ideas and suggestions • All the rockhip64 maintainers at Armbian project who have done and do most of the work to support the platform

DISCLAIMER (PLEASE READ): everything you can find in this thread (binaries, texts, code snippets, etc...) are provided AS-IS and are not part of official Armbian project. For this reason not people from Armbian project nor myself are responsible for misuse or loss of functionality of hardware. Please don't ask about support or assistance in other non-community forums nor in the official Armbian github repository, instead post your questions in this thread, in the TV Boxes forum section (hardware related) or in the Peer-to-peer support section (general linux/software related). Thank you! This is CSC Armbian for XT-Q8L-V10 boards, also known as Chiptrip Q8, Vsmart Q8, ENY 3288 Q8, etc... All source code has been merged into Armbian mainline project. I still keep my personal public Armbian fork for experimental features: https://github.com/paolosabatino/armbian-build Stable and nightly images: Armbian XT-Q8L-V10 Download page Quick installation instructions on eMMC: Build or download your preferred Armbian image from Download page and a copy of the Multitool; Burn the Multitool on an SD card; once done, place the Armbian image in images folder of the SD card FAT partition; Plug the SD card in the TV box and plug in the power cord. After some seconds the blue led starts blinking and the Multitool appears; OPTIONAL: you can do a backup of the existing firmware with "Backup flash" menu option; Choose "Burn image to flash" from the menu, then select the destination device (usually mmcblk2) and the image to burn; Wait for the process to complete, then choose "Shutdown" from main menu; Unplug the sd card, then push the power button for 1 second (the led will turn blue) After 10 seconds HDMI will turn on and you will get logging messages; On first boot you will be asked for entering a password for root user of your choice and the name and password for a regular user Run armbian-config to configure timezone, locales and other personal options Congratulations, Armbian is now installed! Boot from SD Card/USB stick (with Armbian already installed in eMMC, empty eMMC or no eMMC): Build or download your preferred Armbian image from Download page; Burn the image on your SD card/USB stick; Plug the SD card/USB stick in the device; Push the power button for 1 second (the led will turn blue); After 10 seconds HDMI will turn on and you will get logging messages; On first boot you will be asked for entering a password for root user of your choice and the name and password for a regular user Run armbian-config to configure timezone, locales and other personal options Congratulations, Armbian is now installed! Boot from SD Card/USB stick (with original firmware or other firmware): In case your box has the original firmware installed, use the Multitool to erase the internal flash. Don't worry, you will not brick your box: once the eMMC is emptied, the box will automatically boot from SD Card. This is called Maskrom mode and is common to all Rockchip devices. Instructions and download links for the Multitool are at the bottom of this post. After erasing the internal eMMC, just follow the "Boot from SD Card" procedure above and then you are fine. Boot priority: Newer images (those with mainline kernel >= 4.14.50) now support booting from multiple devices. Priority is fixed and boot devices are probed in this order: External SD card External USB storage device (Any USB Stick/Hard drive attached to USB host ports) Internal eMMC This way even if you install armbian to internal eMMC, you can still easily test different images booting from external devices. Experts notes: when armbian is installed into eMMC you get U-boot installed too in eMMC. This is important to know because the box won't boot in Maskrom Mode, but instead will always boot the embedded U-boot, no matter if you put an sdcard/usb stick. In practice the embedded U-boot is totally responsible for the boot priority. If you want to restore the Maskrom Mode, just erase U-boot from eMMC using this command: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mmcblk2 seek=64 count=8128 conv=sync,fsync Current status: Wireless: works. pretty fast and stable, signal is strong on my box; Bluetooth: works. I was able to transfer files and stream audio without problems USB ports: works, with autosuspend too. A quick benchmark show that transfer rate is quite good (topped at 34 MB/s) USB OTG: works in host mode. Transfer rate is very good (> 40 MB/s) MMC: works and is perfectly accessible as storage device. The images above with "eMMC friendly" have been tested and work when installed in eMMC using the standard armbian-config eMMC installer SDCard: works. legacy kernel is limited to high speed, while mainline works fine in UHS mode too. A quick benchmark with a Samsung EVO card shows the promised 48Mb/s read speed. Gigabit Ethernet: works, fast and reliably HDMI: works perfectly Serial: works Audio: both HDMI audio and SPDIF connector works IR remote: works on legacy and mainline kernels Reboot/Suspend process: rebooting the device is a working in progress, at the moment sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Suspend is still not available. Hardware acceleration: everything which works for rk3288 boards applies here too. This guide or maybe the Media Testing Script will help you gain an hardware accelerated X11 and Chromium (using GL4ES I enjoyed Quake 2 from the start till the end, but also Quake and Quake III Arena work flawlessy, here a quick how-to to compile and install GL4ES) Multitool: The Multitool is a small but powerful tool to easy operate on internal eMMC flash of RK3288 devices. Features: Backup the content of internal eMMC Restore a previously backed-up image to eMMC Erase the eMMC (via fast blkdiscard or zero-fill as fallback) Burn an Armbian (or LibreELEC) image directly on the eMMC Provide a recovery shell for manual maintenance Windows-friendly: everything is placed in a FAT partition Image compression format autodetection: they are decompressed on-the-fly during burn process Instructions are simple: Download the image from here Burn it on an sdcard Open the FAT partition with your preferred file manager Place the images you want to burn on the device in images directory (backups will be stored in backups directory) Plug the sd card in the RK3288 device Power the device and wait few seconds, the Multitool menu will appear on screen and can be navigated with the keyboard Last edit: 07/06/2020 - updated installation instructions