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 )

[finmark]

I would avoid the SPI flash.  Having a good U-Boot on the eMMC works.  It won't let you boot multiple operating systems on the same media, but it will let you boot from any device.  You easily flash a good U-Boot over the Manjaru one without affecting Manjaru itself.

The one that I use which comes with NetBSD (and can probably be sourced other ways) doesn't have a "menu" but it does have a command interpreter that you can invoke by pressing a key when prompted.

See this: https://youtube.com/shorts/jVab9bcjM_I

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?

Thanks for sharing. I saw this video. its very helpful for me.