Can Armbian use the SPI on the Cubie a5e?

[Meestor_X]

I seem to remember at one point thinking that U-Boot could be installed into the SPI on the a5e and then I could choose the boot order. Is that possible or did I just dream it?

 

If it is, how do I install U-Boot into the SPI? Is there one specifically for the a5e?

[Igor]

1 hour ago, Meestor_X said:

I seem to remember at one point thinking that U-Boot could be installed into the SPI on the a5e and then I could choose the boot order.

It is possible but I think it is currently broken / unfinished / does not work (properly) yet.

[Meestor_X]

I've gotten it working. I'll detail the steps soon, but it's not difficult. I just want to confirm that running it this way I can boot from sd/usb/nvme/eMMC/Network, and see if changing the boot order works.

[RoganDawes]

Also interested in this. Was able to install using `sudo ./sunxi-fel -p spiflash-write 0 u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin`, where the u-boot image came from the Armbian I downloaded (scp'd it off). That makes use of a patch submitted to the sunxi-tools repo (https://github.com/linux-sunxi/sunxi-tools/pull/232), which does actually work.

 

It is quite happy to boot the image from SD card, and runs even when there is no SD card installed, which is great!

 

However, I don't see any SPI or mtdblock messages in dmesg, and naturally, none exist in /dev/. Am I missing something? Or is SPI not enabled currently for some reason?