First. Fot this kind of development and hacking serial console aka UART is mandatory. Nobody will want to play a guessing game if something doesn't work, so we need a boot log to figure out what happens during the boot process.   From here: Assuming you booted a Xenial legacy image and installed flashrom (standard one from the Ubuntu repository) Assuming you extracted a .deb file from here and put u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin in your home directory Assuming SPI flash size is 16MBit dd if=/d