Kali Linux for Pinebook Pro
#41
I want to move my Kali installation on the SD card to the eMMC. There is last Manjaro (with 2 user partitions) installed on the eMMC. I see no extlinux.conf but boot.txt on Kali.
Previously trying to flash Kali to the eMMC (several times) I needed to flash Manjaro back with eMMC adapter (was unable to boot from SD disabling eMMC switch) to be able to boot.
Any suggestions? Grateful in advance.
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#42
(06-06-2020, 03:17 AM)chaoskampf Wrote:
(06-05-2020, 09:19 PM)AustinFoss Wrote: I did a test of Kali from an SD and it worked great. So I flashed it to the  eMMC, rebooted and worked well.

But then I ran sudo apt upgrade and now it doesn't move past a black screen after reboot. Both when booting from the eMMC and now I can't even install Kali from the sd card. The red power light comes on but it doesn't turn green and just hangs there.

Is there something from the upgrade process that may be preventing my PBP from booting to the SD?

I had that same issue before. This is a known issue. I flashed manjaro to emmc with adapter. It is probably possible to flash without adapter using emmc switch (pbp wiki or search forum).


I have the exact same issue. Booted Kali 2020.2 of an SD-card. Used dd to write the image to the eMMC. Rebooted inte Kali from the eMMC and it worked just perfect. I was actually doing some rooms over at TryHackMe just to try it out and it worked so good. 

That was yesterday, today I rebooted again because of an issue in Kali and now it won't boot again. The orange power led lints up but screen stays blank san no green light. Tried to insert the sd-card again but same thing.

What do you mean that this is a known issue?? You are not supposed to be able to install anything on the eMMC??? How could it boot the first time??? Im really sad cause everything looked so damn promising up to this point.... Sad

And what do I do now? Is that adapter the only way?
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#43
I tried this multiple times now and dd the kali-linux-2020.2-pinebook-pro.img into mmcblk2 does not work. You can boot Kali once after reboot but thereafter you are stuck with the orange led and won't be able to boot from either emmc or sd. Is the image from Ofensive Security broken or what is going on here???
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#44
Some more information on this issue. If I switch of the emmc boot from sd with Manjaro and bind the emmc once again and flash the boot loader stuff again like:

dd if=idbloader.img of=/dev/sdb seek=64
dd if=u-boot.itb of=/dev/sdb seek=16384

Then shutdown and remove sd, boot again and Kali works once again. Another reboot and we are back to orang led and hang.

It seems to me as if Kali destroys the bootloader-things upon starting so it can only run once. But that's just a wild guess, something is really broke anyway and its getting frustrating.
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#45
pretty big fan of separate partitions for these bootloaders myself... distros that don't are risking exactly these boot problems.
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#46
Hmm, as far as I can see the / partition in Kali starts 2048 sectors in??? Thats not enough space to protect the u-boot.itb???? Or perhaps Im totally misunderstanding how things work with the emmc.

When I look att the same configuration for Manjaro it seems that it saved 62500 sectors of free space before / and that's a lot more space than Kali. My wild guess here is that 2048 is not enough and that the boot stuff is beeing overwritten by the OS at boot. If I do:

dd if=idbloader.img of=/dev/sdb seek=64
dd if=u-boot.itb of=/dev/sdb seek=16384

Before I reboot Kali it starts up again. Later tonight I might try to move Kali up to sector 62500 if possible and see if this helps with this issue.
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#47
I was able to dd latest 2020.2 image to my 128G eMMC module and after inserting it to PBP I was able to boot and loving. Next I connected to WIFI and performed 
sudo apt update
sudo apt dist-upgrade

There was no errors but after reboot I get blank screen and power led stays on amber color. Never turns green like it is on first boot

Anyone experienced this? Fix? I did this two times and same result

Tx
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#48
>Hmm, as far as I can see the / partition in Kali starts 2048 sectors in???
This what fdisk/cfdisk shows???
Manjaro start at 65500 is some sort of outlier, maybe reserving room for efi,,ESP
Everyone else starts 32768,,16M
How it boots, if you overwrite the first 11M, I can't imagine
If this is really right, 1st part starts at 2048,,1M, then cat a 15M blank file
plus extracted image,,, then dd idbloader, uboot, ATF (trust) to that altered image
You can also run fdisk on an image file, it won't have right end though
If you are right, someone screwed up
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#49
kali image:

Code:
fdisk -l kali-linux-2020.2-pinebook-pro.img
Disk kali-linux-2020.2-pinebook-pro.img: 13.69 GiB, 14680064000 bytes, 28672000 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x03357e89

Device                              Boot Start      End  Sectors  Size Id Type
kali-linux-2020.2-pinebook-pro.img1      2048 28671999 28669952 13.7G 83 Linux

kali on sd:

Code:
fdisk -l /dev/mmcblk1
Disk /dev/mmcblk1: 59.49 GiB, 63864569856 bytes, 124735488 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x03357e89

Device        Boot Start      End  Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/mmcblk1p1      2048 124735487 124733440 59.5G 83 Linux

manjaro on emmc:

Code:
fdisk -l /dev/mmcblk2
Disk /dev/mmcblk2: 58.25 GiB, 62537072640 bytes, 122142720 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x50435990

Device        Boot  Start      End  Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/mmcblk2p1      62500    500000    437501 213.6M  c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/mmcblk2p2      500001 122142719 121642719    58G 83 Linux
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#50
OK, whoever put it together didn't know that there either has to be idbloader, uboot, ATF (arm trusted firmware, trust)
in the RIGHT place or, if it was designed to be written to a partition, with no mbr,
and a note that is what was intended, and maybe some advice
If you have a properly booting SD with an OK uboot, wipe out partitions, redo (starting 32768, 1 partition),
dd bs=1M skip=1 to that partition (I would assume that partition in image has a ext4 fs)
And then expand the fs to use whole partition (resize2fs, then fsck)
Sort of suggests that it was never tested
You can copy a running, booted system (on SD) to emmc.,,, rsync -av ......
not dev, sys, proc, run,,make empty directories for them
(and, of course, with 1st 16M set up properly,, edit extlinux.conf too)
idbloader at 64 sectors, uboot at 8M, ATF at 12M
There's more than 1 way to skin a cat, I have shown 3 ways, take yr pick
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