Has Armbian decided to not support eMMC any more for the RockPro64 ?

[AxelFoley]

This was my goto distro and Im going to have to find another one because of the lack of support for eMMC going forward.

Why has the 5 kernels led to the drop in support for eMMC?  

[lanefu]

Don't confuse current circumstance with an overt decision.     What have you done to troubleshoot and participate in diagnosing and solving the problem?

 

Also look-up maintainer

 

https://docs.armbian.com/Release_Board-Maintainers/

[Igor]

10 hours ago, AxelFoley said:

because of the lack of support

 

Lets do some quick reality check.

 

- dietpi uses our kernel without any changes. They only do branding / bash scripting / software installer. When something breaks down, they come to this forum as you did.

- manjaro builds what comes to mainline which can only be worse then our untested automated builds from the trunk https://github.com/armbian/build/releases/tag/latest

 

None of those provides any support you have in mind - bug fixes are not coming from those directions - and others are not even close to this. Fixing is more like random chaos.

 

If you wants that things improve, you can support our project by understanding what we actually do, by making a donation / subscription so we will be some day able to hire people to support random hardware you are purchasing without software support from Ali-express. We are long over maximum capacity and bug resolution span is around one year.

 

... because of lack of support from users / vendor / * side. And you are putting a pressure on Armbian? Crazy. 

[AxelFoley]

Hi @Igor,

           I am happy to contribute to the project if it helps. 

Do the maintainers need a Pine RockPro64 with 64Gb eMMC ?

I can order a couple more at the end of the month and send one to the maintainers. just let me know with a DM.

 

I'm also happy to test releases if people want me to, but I spend most of my free time on DE10 Nano and the Pine RocPro64 Pico Clusters I run are mainly to test orchestration toolsets like Ansible and SaltStack and Distributed DB's like Cassandra.

I have a VMWare Server to run RHEL Container platforms like Openshift to test things like Service Discovery Consul and Monitoring with Prometheus/Grafana for proprietary apps. 

That's my background I'm no bootstrap expert (after UEFI I gave up interest in the subject), but I can pick stuff up

I don't check this forum often so somebody would have to reach out to me to be part of a QA Process for that board.  

 

I seem to spend weeks when I am doing a cluster rebuild just testing and trying to find a stable image that is;

 

1). Debian based distro

2). 64bit (arm64)

3). That boots to eMMC.

4). That has a Desktop build for the control plane node that supports attached Nvme Storage

5). That has a CLI build for the worker nodes.

 

Its seems to be a constant problem with these Pine RockPro64 boards.

They are hardly an AliExpress Clone outfit ... Pine are quite well established 🙂 www.pine64.org

 

Let me know how you feel I can contribute 

 

[TheLinuxBug]

Can you actually attach a USB TTL serial adapter and look to see if there are any specific errors with the EMMC being loaded?  Usually this type of issue indicates a change in u-boot, not the image it's self.  It would seem like maybe a change to the dtb was made that has somehow disabled the emmc.

 

With a little research you can probably pull the u-boot off of an older image and stick it on a new one to test or you can use an older image and upgrade it.  Lastly you could manually build u-boot your self and add it to the new image.

 

And yes, a lot of these things are a moving target since there are a lot of boards in Rockchip64 and it appears as updates are made for the family, some of the fixes break other things.  I know the developers have been fighting with some of this.

 

In general though, as long as the emmc is enabled in dtb there should be no reason you can't write to and boot from the emmc.

 

my 2 cents.

 

Cheers!

[Igor]

1 hour ago, AxelFoley said:

I am happy to contribute to the project if it helps. 

 

Its hard to miss, but this is what project needs:
https://forum.armbian.com/staffapplications/

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

https://www.armbian.com/donate

 

1 hour ago, AxelFoley said:

Do the maintainers need a Pine RockPro64 with 64Gb eMMC ?

 

Maintainers needs to eat and pay their bills. There are several people full time just to maintain this project in general. Will the purchase to support ali-express business and you support their time?

 

1 hour ago, AxelFoley said:

I can order a couple more at the end of the month

 

Rather donate money to charity. We can easily get HW for free. This is how entirely support is build up - throw some HW to community and they will support it for free. But there are very little people that knows and can afford to spent endless hours making endless variants of HW operational. 

 

We can also purchase it easily since this is close to nothing expense versus expenses we have by dealing with this project. Number are out of date, but it gives you the frame.

 

1 hour ago, AxelFoley said:

I'm also happy to test releases

 

For that you need to register / become a maintainer. Then someone (you or your hw vendor don't support) will call you to assist, when and if that is required. Bugs will be found but anyway we don't have ability (resources) to record or fix bugs since operation is too expensive. But its a path, we can hire people for you, if you need this. We don't.

 

1 hour ago, AxelFoley said:

Its seems to be a constant problem with these Pine RockPro64 boards.

 

HW they design, throw out, focus on sales, in the same time they already design a new board ... Software needs constant support while you expect it for free, HW sellers give nothing on that. And also can't do much neither.

 

1 hour ago, AxelFoley said:

Pine are quite well established

 

Selling poorly designed hardware with promise of software reliability but in fact with no/poor software support leaving expenses of R&D and maintaining to the community?

[AxelFoley]

1 hour ago, TheLinuxBug said:

Can you actually attach a USB TTL serial adapter and look to see if there are any specific errors with the EMMC being loaded?  Usually this type of issue indicates a change in u-boot, not the image it's self.  It would seem like maybe a change to the dtb was made that has somehow disabled the emmc.

 

With a little research you can probably pull the u-boot off of an older image and stick it on a new one to test or you can use an older image and upgrade it.  Lastly you could manually build u-boot your self and add it to the new image.

 

And yes, a lot of these things are a moving target since there are a lot of boards in Rockchip64 and it appears as updates are made for the family, some of the fixes break other things.  I know the developers have been fighting with some of this.

 

In general though, as long as the emmc is enabled in dtb there should be no reason you can't write to and boot from the emmc.

 

my 2 cents.

 

Cheers!

 >> Thx Serial console cable on order  lets see what I can see tomorrow.  

[AxelFoley]

@Igor Understood .... Subscription taken out and Serial cable orders so I can track the boot sequence tomorrow ..... 

[revoman]

While I don't have a ton of time to contribute at the moment, I have been running the RockPro64's for a while (with 4 port HBA's in the PCIe slot).  And I connect via serial terminal frequently.   I'm posting here to keep an eye on this.