How to boot Manjaro from NVME with uboot on eMMC

[mamboman777]

I have taken below steps to achieve booting from NVME. It can be probably mirrored on Debian with some small changes since Manjaro is using boot.scr and Debian extlinux.conf.


First download a package: uboot-pinebookpro-2017.09-2-aarch64.pkg.tar.xz. It has uboot files with @pcm720 patches included. Current Manjaro uboot package does not have nvme support enabled. This is subject to change.

1. Extract the files from the package: idbloader.img, trust.img, uboot.img.
2. Write uboot files (pay attention to your device - it has to be eMMC !!! In my case /dev/mmcblk2):

"dd if=idbloader.img of=/dev/mmcblk2 bs=32k seek=1 conv=fsync"
"dd if=uboot.img of=/dev/mmcblk2 bs=64k seek=128 conv=fsync"
"dd if=trust.img of=/dev/mmcblk2 bs=64k seek=192 conv=fsync"

3. Create partition on your NVME drive to rsync filesystem from eMMC.
4. Mount the partition - lets say in /mnt
5. "cd /mnt"
6. "mkdir dev proc sys mnt"
7. "rsync -aHxv --numeric-ids --progress /* /mnt --exclude=/dev --exclude=/proc --exclude=/sys --exclude=/mnt"
8. chroot to your newly synced partition "chroot /mnt".
9. "cd /boot"
9. Edit boot.txt and change "root=PARTUUID=${uuid}" to "root=/dev/nvme0n1p1" (if your new partition is first on disk).
10. Run "./mkscr" (you might have to chmod +x if it's not executable).
11. Exit chroot "exit".
12. On eMMC !!! Rename boot directory to something else eg. boot.old.
13. Reboot machine - you should boot from NVME.
14. After sucessful reboot check "lsblk" it should be something like:

[root@pbp ~]# lsblk
NAME         MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
mmcblk2      179:0    0  58.2G  0 disk
└─mmcblk2p1  179:1    0  58.2G  0 part
mmcblk2boot0 179:32   0     4M  1 disk
mmcblk2boot1 179:64   0     4M  1 disk
nvme0n1      259:0    0 894.3G  0 disk
└─nvme0n1p1  259:1    0    20G  0 part /


In case you want to start the system from eMMC just rename boot.old to boot on eMMC. Opposite to what has been done in step 12.

Enjoy !

I have got this working.  Thanks for the tutorial!  Does boot from SD work with this?  I'm having some issues booting from SD.  The PBP boots, then I get a black sreen when the SD card is inserted.  I'm trying to use the Chromium image from the PBP wiki.

Thanks again!
-Josh