On Thu, Oct 06, 2016 at 11:40:58AM +0200, Jean-Christian de Rivaz wrote: > The U-Boot and the installer was on a SD card that was only created by > decompressing and concatenating this two files: > https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/armhf/daily/netboot/SD-card-images/firmware.orangepi_plus.img.gz > https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/armhf/daily/netboot/SD-card-images/partition.img.gz > At some point this installer make some partitions and format on the eMMC > with an offset to make place before them for the boot0 and boot1 files that > certainly correspond to first stages bootloader of the H3.
On emmc, boot0 and boot1 are NOT partitions. They are dedicated boot areas on eMMC, which is a neat feature really. Not all chips support it. > I think this is a wrong assumption. The firmware.orangepi_plus.img contain > the first stages bootloaders and U-Boot to boot the installer. Evidence are > on that log file: > https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/armhf/daily/build_u-boot.log and the > very basic fact that the installer simply boot. Without the SD card inserted > there is no message at all on the console. Well it is how the debian installer currently works. The different u-boot setups are quite a mess and handling every single board variant with every single boot option would be a huge job, while simply handling installing the rootfs is much simpler and generic. > Yes, I think U-Boot is on the SD card to boot the installer. And yes, I > expect that the installer install U-Boot on the eMMC, otherwise there is no > point in having a such installer. The goal is to install a working system, > no ? By the way it look like the installer have installed something that > look like the two first stages bootloader on the /dev/mmcblk1boot0 and > /dev/mmcblk1boot1 blocks on the eMMC, but for some reason this don't work as > expected. Well often there are dip switches or jumpers that have to be changed on a board to change between eMMC and SD booting. No idea about that board. >From what I can find, it seems it boots from eMMC if there is no SD card present. One page I found seems to indicate that it does not boot from the boot area of the eMMC and instead requires the boot loader places at offset 8k from the start of the eMMC, after the partition table, before the first partition, and also appears to require a fat partition to be first to store boot files, although whether that is required or not I don't know. -- Len Sorensen
