Pinebook picky about which EMMC will boot

[ajtravis]

[...]
I have a couple more troubleshooting tricks up my sleeve, but I am running out of ideas on this one and would like to know what the community thinks. PBA has the nvme adapter so I can use the manjaro-arm-flasher to flash the EMMC and see if that helps.  Perhaps setting up the OS completely on PBA and then swapping to PBB might do the trick? Could the set up be causing the trouble?  I also havent tried booting from SD or distros other than Manjaro, but I will try that stuff as I move through this issue.

Hi, I had similar problems after updating Armbian but I finally tracked the problem down to the 'firmware' version (kernel, dbd etc.): None of the Armbian releases with Linux kernels newer than 5.10 will boot from eMMC, but they boot fine from SD. If I downgrade the Armbian 'firmware' using "armbian-config" to a release using the 5.10 kernel, before installing it to eMMC, it will then boot and run from eMMC via "Tow-Boot" in SPI.

I can get the latest release of Manjaro to boot from SD, but it doesn't detect the eMMC as /dev/mmcblk2, so I can't use the "manjaro-arm-installer" to install it to eMMC. The latest release uses a 6.0 Linux kernel.

Try Armbian with a 5.10 kernel as I've described and see if it boots from eMMC. However, you are better off using "Tow-Boot" in SPI than trying to get it to boot directly from eMMC.

This is the current Manjaro with a 6.0 kernel booted from SD (Armbian present in eMMC, but not detected):

Code:

[root@pinebook-pro ~]# uname -a
Linux pinebook-pro 6.0.2-3-MANJARO-ARM #1 SMP PREEMPT Sun Oct 16 16:24:03 UTC 2022 aarch64 GNU/Linux
[root@pinebook-pro ~]# lsblk -f
NAME        FSTYPE FSVER LABEL      UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
mmcblk1                                                                                 
├─mmcblk1p1 vfat   FAT16 BOOT_MNJRO 7034-E65D                             443.1M     9% /boot
└─mmcblk1p2 ext4   1.0   ROOT_MNJRO af018c04-7d54-4dc2-84f5-51da5012037b   22.6G    15% /
zram0                                                                                   [SWAP]
nvme0n1                                                                               

This is the Armbian I installed to eMMC with a 5.10 kernel and dbd (Manjaro SD present in /dev/mmcblk1):

Code:

Linux pinebook-pro 5.10.60-rockchip64 #21.08.1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Aug 25 18:56:55 UTC 2021 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux
root@pinebook-pro:~# lsblk -f
NAME         FSTYPE FSVER LABEL      UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
mtdblock0                                                                               
mmcblk2                                                                                 
└─mmcblk2p1  ext4   1.0              acd39700-8723-46ef-b204-b09d04e03f7e   47.7G    10% /var/log.hdd
                                                                                         /
mmcblk2boot0                                                                             
mmcblk2boot1                                                                             
mmcblk1                                                                                 
├─mmcblk1p1  vfat   FAT16 BOOT_MNJRO 7034-E65D                                           
└─mmcblk1p2  ext4   1.0   ROOT_MNJRO af018c04-7d54-4dc2-84f5-51da5012037b               
zram0                                                                                    [SWAP]
zram1                                                                       39.7M     8% /var/log
zram2                                                                                   
nvme0n1                                                                                 

I'm not sure if it's the kernel or the dbd device tree that's wrong, but the eMMC device is not detected by kernels newer than 5.10.

HTH,

  Tony.