Ubuntu 18.04 installation to eMMC ESPRESSObin v7

niall · February 7, 2019

I have worked through the installation of Armbian Ubuntu 18.04 to the embedded MMC in an ESPRESSObin v7. It took a while and there were some quirks along the way, so here is a procedure with observations that may be useful to others.

The Armbian u-boot does not appear to recognise the eMMC. I used Globalscale's u-boot espressobin-bootloader-cpu-1000-ddr4-1cs-1g
I created a USB stick using the standard procedure and booted the ESPRESSObin from this.

I copied the Armbian .img file to the ESPRESSObin USB system and used this to flash the eMMC

sudo dd if= Armbian_5.69_Espressobin_Debian_stretch_next_4.19.14 of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=128K status=progress

I could then mount the Linux partition on the eMMC.

sudo mkdir /mnt/emmc
sudo mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt/emmc

Note that the eMMC u-boot device number is "1" (not the hard-coded 0 in the boot.scr) so I edited /mnt/emmc/boot/boot.cmd to use $devnum instead:

...
# use $devnum in place of hard-coded 0

ext4load $boot_interface $devnum:1  $kernel_addr ${prefix}$image_name      
ext4load $boot_interface $devnum:1  $initrd_addr ${prefix}$initrd_image
ext4load $boot_interface $devnum:1  $fdt_addr ${prefix}$fdt_name_a
ext4load $boot_interface $devnum:1  $fdt_addr ${prefix}$fdt_name_b

I generated the boot.scr u-boot file:

sudo mkimage -C none -A arm -T script -d /mnt/emmc/boot/boot.cmd /mnt/emmc/boot/boot.scr

I rebooted with the USB stick removed. The system booted from the eMMC, however there were some issues with the Ubuntu system...
The Linux startup waited for two minutes for systemd-networkd-wait-online.service. This appears to be a common issue with multiple Ethernet ports. I disabled the systemd-networkd-wait-online.service
```
sudo systemctl disable systemd-networkd-wait-online.service
```
The Ubuntu system would not use the DHCP provided DNS server. I modifed /etc/systemd/resolved.conf to remove the default DNS server (1.0.0.1)
The naming of the Ethernet ports in Armbian is different to Globalscale's

Front view

USB2.0 lan1 lan0 wan USB3.0 (Armbian)

USB2.0 wan lan0 lan1 USB3.0 (Globalscale)

I set my system with three nn-bridged Ethernet ports

ls  /etc/systemd/network/
10-br0.netdev.disbled  10-br0.network.disabled  10-eth0.network  10-lan0.network  10-lan1.network  10-wan.network

cat /etc/systemd/network/*
[NetDev]
Name=br0
Kind=bridge
[Match]
Name=br0
[Network]
#DHCP=ipv4
#BindCarrier=eth0
[Match]
Name=eth0
[Network]
[Match]
Name=lan0
[Network]
#Bridge=br0
DHCP=ipv4
BindCarrier=eth0
[Match]
Name=lan1
[Network]
#Bridge=br0
DHCP=ipv4
BindCarrier=eth0
[Match]
Name=wan 
[Network]
#Bridge=br0
DHCP=ipv4
BindCarrier=eth0

I could not find a way to specify the MAC addresses for the Ethernet ports so I installed macchanger and go it to assign random MACs at startup. See https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MAC_address_spoofing for setup.

ebin-dev · February 9, 2019

Just in case someone wants to load the bootloader from eMMC: the necessary emmc flash images are here. (BOOTDEV is set to EMMCNORM)

- EMMCNORM - eMMC Download Mode
	Download boot loader or program code from eMMC flash into CM3 or CA53
	Requires full initialization and command sequence