Rockpi 4C - General Question

[DominicanGuy]

Hi! 

First of all I want to thank the people behind this project, you are doing an excellent job.

Second, I am new, like very new to this world of SBCs and Linux, decided to experiment new things while being furloughed from my job, as airline pilot in North America.

 

I bought a Rockpi 4C and at first I installed the image from Radxa and joined their forum, and bumped into an post from Igor in which he suggested to try Armbian because things were more easier, and boy was he right about that?! Yes I flashed Armbian Focal (CLI) to my emmc and armbian-config really does the job.. it makes your like way to easier. The image I flashed was the 20.11.6  Focal with current Kernel 5.9.14 until today, where while doing and apt upgrade I was prompted about upgrading the u-boot-tools package and got further prompted to either install the maintainer's version or to keep the current. I will come back to that in a bit...

 

So all looks good on this side (as far as I know)... here is my Armbianmonitor output. Now my question is, whenever a an upgraded kernel or image comes out, for example I see 20.0.10 with same current kernel is out,

1) do I need to reflash the emmc in order to be able to take advantage of the changes, or the update/upgrade commands will take care of it?

2) My system is still booting from the emmc, correct?

OR

3) Would I need to take the emmc out to reflash the new image?

4) Can't I just flash it while the system is running and then reboot?

 

Ok so coming back to the u-boot-tools topic...

 

Today I went down the update the maintainer's package version path thinking that the maintainer was ARMBIAN, but it turned out to the apparently Canonical because now my system shows Ubuntu 20.04.02 LTS instead of 20.11.6 like before, so...

1) Did I do something wrong?

2) If so, can it be reverted or fixed?

Take a look at a new output from Armbianmonitor and let me know please.

 

Any suggestions to tweak my system will be welcomed... I mainly have this system setup as a NAS with NextCloud and will be doing some work with Odoo, don't have time for video games really...

Again thank you guys for the time and effort you put into this project.

Ah one last thing.. which tabs on the form do you suggest me to follow or select or tick to keep an eye on?

 

GRACIAS!

[tmountain]

Hi,

 

Space is reserved at the beginning of the emmc for u-boot, and your kernel, initrd, etc... are located after this reserved space.  When u-boot starts up, it does a bunch of initialization and then hands over control the kernel. As such, updating your kernel does not require a re-flash, as u-boot will find the new kernel by default. The document below is useful in understanding the storage topology.

 

http://opensource.rock-chips.com/wiki_Boot_option

 

Secondly, I should mention that there is a more discrete relationship between u-boot and the root filesystem, as it will read files in your /boot directory which can influence its behavior (boot.scr and armbianEnv.txt) or for some OS (extlinux.conf, etc), but you should not need to change settings unless you want to customize your boot process (change the boot logo, etc).

 

Lastly, some devices like the raspberry pi look for a dedicated FAT partition for the aforementioned boot files, but it looks like the Rockpi 4C looks for its root partition at 0x8000 as referenced in the document above. You can see the partition table to confirm by doing: fdisk /dev/mmcblk2 then pressing "p".

[DominicanGuy]

Thank you @tmountain for taking the time to reply, much appreciated. I will take a look at the link posted and try to understand a bit more.

 

Perhaps @Igorcould shed more light on my other questions whenever possible.

 

DG

[Igor]

1 hour ago, DominicanGuy said:

could shed more light on my other questions whenever possible.

 

This week we received 5 EUR of donations  from a guy which he then registered and send me a letter in private asking for a bunch of technical question he was not able to find via Google. I would turn him down if he would give me 1.000. Ofc I told him to fu* off right away. Sadly this kind of abuse is happening all the time and I if I start answering all of questions I can easily blow 10h every day. The problem is that most of the people don't even think they are doing something wrong. Something very bad. Something damaging.

 

3 hours ago, DominicanGuy said:

Second, I am new, like very new to this world of SBCs and Linux,

 

Armbian Linux is a community project and first thing on your mind should be what you can do ... Not what more you can take from it. Without answering on this question, people, core group that works on the project, invests around 50-80 working hours every day. We also have fixed costs to run this project which roughly costs about 3.000 - 4.000 EUR. Every day. Public share is almost non-existing. 

https://forum.armbian.com/subscriptions/

https://www.armbian.com/donate

https://forum.armbian.com/forum/54-help-wanted/

For people, that take some burden away, I am always there.

[DominicanGuy]

Yes @Igor I do know what you mean, and my thought was to actually purchase some swag because there are quite a few nice pieces of merch.

Like I mentioned.. I am still new into all of this, new to this world and I admire the effort and endless amount of hours you guys/girls have put into this project...

 

 

[jeanrhum]

On my side I prefer to use debian builds on the current boards I currently run at home (edge-v, station M1, pinh64-b). When I update packages, u-boot and kernel may be upgraded as armbian specific packages so that I'm always up-to-date without having to make a fresh install.

Concerning your ubuntu specific package upgrade, I can't answer you, but if you system work as expected...