Armbian EMMC Image for NanoPi-K2

[Subair]

i have a S905 TV box with eMMC ,  i did tried all methods to boot from eMMC, boot from SD is working even with mainline uboot.

if any testing required i can do it 

[martinayotte]

3 hours ago, Subair said:

i did tried all methods to boot from eMMC

Unfortunately, we never got working a proper magic detection from eMMC.

The only way is to have U-Boot remaning on SD-Card and have ROOTFS on eMMC.

[Subair]

On 3/15/2020 at 4:08 PM, martinayotte said:

Thank you, I  was able to do it with the android way, compiled from Amlogic source code. the distro is busybox. now trying to use debian 

 

[chewitt]

I'm posting here in the hope someone with a NanoPi-K2 board can test-boot the following LibreELEC image from an eMMC module and SD (the same image should boot both). If it does work the long-running mystery of how to combine various bits of upstream u-boot (2022.07) with Amlogic signed firmware and MBR structures is solved. I'm able to boot an S905 set-top box (WeTek Play2) so I'm fairly confident it should work.

 

Here's the test image: https://chewitt.libreelec.tv/testing/LibreELEC-AMLGX.arm-10.85.0-nanopi-k2.img.gz

[hexdump]

hi @chewitt - i cannot test it as i gave my k2 away a while ago, but i would be curious about what you did still ... can you maybe say a bit about it or link the patches used?

 

best wishes - hexdump

[chewitt]

See commits here: https://github.com/chewitt/amlogic-boot-fip/commits/gxbb-sd-emmc which is based on the original detective work done by @Kwiboo here https://github.com/Kwiboo/u-boot/commit/6d0a17632922077a2e64b13ae1a6bdf0024b718f .. waaaay back in 2016, so the solution has been sitting under our noses all this time

 

The one difference from his instructions is that I don't use the same 'fusing' instructions, I use the standard LE ones https://github.com/LibreELEC/LibreELEC.tv/blob/master/projects/Amlogic/bootloader/mkimage#L8-L9

 

Here's the u-boot log https://pastebin.com/raw/pVSHMueQ and dmesg https://pastebin.com/raw/n5E3Rq96 showing emmc boot on the WP2.

[d51x]

hi 

yesterday I was able put armbian on emmc and boot from emmc without SD/USB on s905.

may be it can help? 

 

[chewitt]

That's interesting (some clever work) but a slightly different topic. You're manipulating the Amlogic (2015.01 based) u-boot and the custom partition layout to suit Armbian/Linux. It looks rather fiddly to execute but suits TV box devices where you have no access to the vendor customised u-boot sources. I'm creating new distro images that boot using upstream u-boot (2022.07) from SD or eMMC and clean-install the OS with standard mbr/msdos partitions. This is cleaner, but needs access to the vendor u-boot sources to build/extract the FIPs and customised software bits needed for signing the modern u-boot binaries.

 

NB: I'd like to see an effort to script or create tools that deconstruct the contents of vendor images to extract the acs.bin/bl2.bin/bl301.bin files which are tweaked for the device (esp. acs.bin which has the often low-bin RAM timings). These could then be used with other common files (bl21.bin/bl30.bin/etc.) to create a FIP package for signing modern u-boot.

 

Спасибо, что поделились!

[hexdump]

@chewitt - not really automated, but at least a way to get the acs info from a box boot block: look at an existing acs file for that type of soc - usually it is possible to find the signature of its beginning in the boot area of a box dump and iirc the end is clear from size and some free space afterwards as well - this worked well for me for g12a and sm1 where acs can be assembed in properly when building new boot blocks - see: https://github.com/hexdump0815/u-boot-misc/blob/d75cf6cbb8f95d7b32ab7f66111c79196d7f7c07/readme.gxy#L153-L158

 

for gxl i extracted the bl* parts (one of which also contains the ram timing) from the box boot blocks via glximg and reassembled new bootblocks based on them - see: https://github.com/hexdump0815/u-boot-misc/blob/b10b9a5aca46438233fde86f96b452d76d7158f8/readme.gxl#L115-L160

 

but i guess you know most of that already

 

best wishes - hexdump