[SOLVED] Brand new pinephone bricked almost immediately out of box...

[wibble]

Would be good if the pinephone prompted you on startup as to whether you intend to boot from eMMC or SD card

That is unfortunately impossible as A64 boot order is SD first, then eMMC.

Well...you'd need the u-boot on the SD to have the option to boot whatever's on the eMMC. Since uBoot can't write to this display you'd have to make the choice using the volume and power buttons, possibly using the LED as an indicator. I've not got round to making up a serial cable to investigate further.

Or have a kernel and initrd on the SD that can load and kexec from partitions on the eMMC or SD.

Great idea! Worth further digging. Unfortunately unless something like this is done we're not going to have expandable storage. Sure we can always flash new larger SD cards, but we'd always need to set up all our personal stuff from scratch. A way to keep the OS on eMMC and have storage on SD would truly be ideal.

That's actually a whole lot easier since you don't need to get user input, just use a uboot config on the SD that boots the eMMC. I'm not sure even that's necessary though - i think you just have to make sure there's no bootloader in the boot sector of the SD, causing it to fall back to booting from the eMMC.