NOOBS

[stuartiannaylor]

Just received my Rock64. Is it possible to boot from USB hard drive?

No, not really.  There is no eufi, nor bios, in the Pinebook. Consequently you cannot boot the typical canonical linux thumb drives, etc;

However, you can boot from SD card, and you can write the images to the internal eMMC module !  Also, it is possible to run parts (if not all) of your /rootfs from usb storage.  

http://opensource.rock-chips.com/images/...170321.pdf

1.2 System Boot RK3328 provides system boot from off-chip devices such as SDMMC card, eMMC memory, serial nand or nor flash. When boot code is not ready in these devices, also provide system RK3328 TRM-Part1 Copyright ©2017 FuZhou Rockchip Electronics Co., Ltd. 14 code download into them by USB OTG interface. All of the boot code will be stored in internal bootrom. The following is the whole boot procedure for boot code, which will be stored in bootrom in advance. The following features are supports.  Support system boot from the following device:  Serial Nor Flash, 1bit data width  eMMC Interface, 8bits data with  SDMMC Card, 4bits data with  Support system code download by USB OTG

I did read and can not find the quote by tkaiser on the armbian forum.

Its not implemented but the RK3328 is capable of running https://github.com/ARM-software/arm-trusted-firmware

TKaiser http://www.cnx-software.com/2017/06/08/r...d-usb-3-0/

Funnily one result of ‘Armbian board bring up’ adventure could be that something like Armbian isn’t necessary any more afterwards. There’s 16 MB of SPI NOR flash on thise device which can hold ATF (ARM trusted firmware) and UEFI (including applications) so once software support is finished Pine Inc can start to pre-populate the SPI flash with a bootloader that allows to boot any Server Base System Architecture (SBSA) compliant 64-bit distro (compare with PC world where hardware initialization and configurations happens in BIOS/EFI and OS runs device agnostic above). Then also no need for SD card or eMMC any more since the OS can be loaded from USB or network too.