Boot Order in Pinebook Pro

[KC9UDX]

That makes sense—keeping a solid U-Boot on eMMC gives flexibility without messing with SPI flash. I’ll check out the NetBSD one. Does it support booting from USB and NVMe smoothly?

At some point they upgraded the U-Boot that comes with NetBSD; so the modern one works even better. But I'm not sure about USB and NVMe support. I expect it works but I haven't tried either.

[DrYak]

I would avoid the SPI flash.

Nowadays (2025), there's the solution of flashing RK2AW on the SPI alongside U-boot

Megi made pre-bootloader/menu that will check if there are bootloaders on the SD card or on the eMMC and those will take precedence, other wise it has 2 backup copies of U-Boot next to it.

So you can flash that on the SPI, and if something goes wrong in the U-Boot you flashed, or if you merely need a different U-Boot for a different OS, you can simply pop a SD card with it and it will boot.

See here for a package containing rk2aw, opensource U-boot, and U-boot with Rockchip's binary memory initialisation:
https://xff.cz/kernels/bootloaders/ (new item: https://xnux.eu/log/091.html )