Boot order

[Barugon]

I just read on the wiki that the PinePhone Pro EMMC has a higher boot priority than the SD card. Why did you do this? I have had several installations on the PinePhone become unbootable after an update and this means that the first time that happens, my phone becomes a paperweight.

[dukla2000]

The decision is by Rockchip for the RK3399.

It is the same for the RockPro64 and Pinebook pro.

It is perfectly possible on all the (Pine64) RK3399 devices to temporarily disable the eMMC during boot to recover a "brick".

[bcnaz]

Just a different Boot priority order I think, If your eMMC is Not bootable, --->Then it should pick the sd card If the sd card is bootable.

[kuleszdl]

Imho, this also makes sense for security reasons: If you normally run your device off eMMC, an attacker with physical access could easily boot from sdcard and tamper with your installation.

If you experiment a lot and prefer to use the eMMC for performance reasons you can still put the bootloader to sd and the rest of the system to eMMC. Then, if you brick the OS stored in eMMC you can swap sdcards and fix or replace it. This approach will require some manual work, though.

Since the SPI has the highest priority, a better general solution would be to have a firmware (e.g. UEFI) in SPI and provide a boot menu from there, just like on x86. Afaik, some developers tried something in this direction, but we are not there yet. For a more general discussion about this, see also this post on Drew's blog:

https://drewdevault.com/2022/01/18/Pine6...ities.html

[Barugon]

It is perfectly possible on all the (Pine64) RK3399 devices to temporarily disable the eMMC during boot to recover a "brick".

Is it possible without partially dissembling the device in order to short two contacts on the motherboard?

Imho, this also makes sense for security reasons: If you normally run your device off eMMC, an attacker with physical access could easily boot from sdcard and tamper with your installation.

That does not enhance security in any way. Anyone with physical access could do anything that I could do.

[dukla2000]

It is perfectly possible on all the (Pine64) RK3399 devices to temporarily disable the eMMC during boot to recover a "brick".

Is it possible without partially dissembling the device in order to short two contacts on the motherboard?
...

It is even easier than that on the Explorer Edition - see the wiki.

[Conjada]

FWIW, I and others have found that our PPP's will boot to SD without doing anything, other than inserting the SD card. I don't know why this would be. After I booted into ArchLinux Phosh, I went ahead and wiped out the eMMC as per the wiki, so I can't test that anymore. But, it DID boot to SD without pushing any buttons at all.

[Barugon]

It is even easier than that on the Explorer Edition - see the wiki.

Thanks.

[kaida]

basically , the PPPEE , will check the emmc for boot ,

The preloaded manjaro has a special version of uboot that will check SD First before booting itself , but if you wipe it and nothing is on the emmc then the SD will also boot ,

if you flash something else to the emmc then the SD won't boot and if it brick then you need to press the reset button under the cover to boot back on a sd card .. so yeah really easy in all scenario

[bcnaz]

NEED a JUMP DRIVE image for the Pro series phone