NanopiM4v2 booting. this is weird

[justin.wills]

Hi all,

 

I have found a weird condition.  I have a home built image running off sd card with no probs.  my EMMC has friendly distro on it.

 

I ran nand-sata-install to install armbian to EMMC.  then I ran growpart and resize2fs against the EMMC and rebooted.  afterwards, host failed to boot from emmc.  so I thought "no probs, boot of sd".  But SD failed to boot also.

 

I tried same SD card in 1st gen nanopim4.  boot happened fine.

 

retried boot in nanopim4v2 and failed to boot.  re-wrote arbian image and still failed to boot from SD.

 

wrote friendly image to sd card and boot happened fine.  ran dd against emmc and re-wrote same armbian image to SD card.  machine booted fine.

 

it seems if you have armbian on emmc  and it's corrupted, it won't boot armbian from the SD card.

 

lucky I've spent plenty of time to get good backups of pretty much any SBC, whether on SD or emmc

[NicoD]

How did you write the images to eMMC? Did you use armbian-config?
 

2 hours ago, justin.wills said:

then I ran growpart and resize2fs against the EMMC

This should not be needed since that's all done by the script.

[justin.wills]

4 hours ago, NicoD said:

How did you write the images to eMMC? Did you use armbian-config?
 

This should not be needed since that's all done by the script.

 

 

I didn't do via armbian-config, just ran nand-sata-install directly

 

I'm more concerned that I then couldn't boot from sd card than the corrupted image on eMMC

[chwe]

https://github.com/armbian/build/blob/9be143c2e4788deae6faf26d8ecfd921cfd52deb/patch/u-boot/u-boot-rk3399/add-board-nanopi-m4v2.patch#L29

 

https://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2017-April/285942.html

 

should explain most of it..

 

this whole mess should be cleaned once we've moved all boards to upstream u-boot for rk3399 boards...

[justin.wills]

thanks.

 

this sums it up really

Quote

 

+ chosen {

+ u-boot,spl-boot-order = &sdmmc, &sdhci;

+ };

 

 

 

interesting tho, that I can boot the Friendly image off sd card.

 

 

[chwe]

without a bootlog nobody can tell you what's going on.. and even then..

 

If you're concerned about bricking the device by messing up bootloader... I don't think that can happen.. It might be just more pain to get it back.. but IMO rk3399 is more or less fail save to work with..

[justin.wills]

yeah, I'm not scared of bricking it.  I have done some hefty testing over the last week with multiple home built images.  no matter what I do, if it fails to boot, I can always boot it of a friendly image on sd card without any trouble.  It's fiddly, but it always works

 

I might have to get a serial cable if I keep mucking around with images.  for now I'll run Armbian off sd card, which seems the safest at this point.  I am running home built images with cpu freq scaling down to 408MHz on m4 and m4v2 now and loving it.  Am considering playing with it on H5 (neo k1plus, neo2plus) units as well.  maybe even on my H3 neo2 metal if I can get the display working.

 

To all involved, keep up the great work on Armbian.  You guys are doing a great job.  I look forward to using the upstream rk3399 u-boot when it becomes available.