SteeMan

First off you aren't following the TV box install instructions. You don't use armbian-install with the aml-s9xx-box builds as it will brick your box. But regardless, even if you were following the correct instructions there is a note there: Note: It is not possible to install into emmc on boxes with the s905 cpu The way that the emmc is laid out on the s905 makes it impossible to intall Armbian to the emmc on that cpu. The later varients (s905x, etc) don't have that issue. So you are stuck running off of SD storage.

If you have other SD cards give them a try. These boxes can be very particular in which SD cards they will be able to read from. Especially if the SD card is newer formats that are not supported by these old boxes. I find about half of the SD cards I buy can't be used on these boxes. But also, note if you've read the TV Box FAQ, don't expect to get wifi working. It rarely works on these Amlogic boxes.

This doesn't seem to have anything to do with Armbian. It might be better to post your question somewhere else.

Your extlinux.conf file is wrong. The "fdt" line is separate from the fdtdir line. You don't touch the fdtdir line and need to add the fdt line.

No you need to boot a full armbian from the SD card. If you have an armbian image on the SD card, it should boot from that before booting from emmc.

You can use ddbr. You just need to boot from an SD card so the emmc isn't being used and then run ddbr from the SD card to make the backup.

Yes that looks fine (you didn't include it in your original post) What Armbian packages do you have installed? apt list --installed | grep armbian

What I think you have missed is updating: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/armbian.list Which if updated to bookworm should install the correct armbian rootfs packages as Werner mentioned.

@Rafael Costa If you want help on this, you should be posting in the thread mentioned above. Those that can help you monitor that thread, not necessarily the whole forum.

At that point you are doing kernel development. There is no reason that the kernel source code being used by Armbian (the vendor branch) supports the features you are enabling. It is very likely that patches from mainline linux will need to be backported to the vendor kernel branch that you are trying to build. This isn't an Armbian issue, but something you would need to do. You are essentially adding features (by enabling kernel feature that Armbian doesn't curently support or test). If you want to go down this path, you should enable items that you need in your kernel config one by one and see which specific features are failing. Again, if you diff your kernel config with the one Armbian uses there are many differences.

So in looking at the diff of your kernel config there is a lot different from base armbian. I'm assuming the image build fine if you don't modify the kernel config file? What are you trying to accomplish? Why are you editing config files?

Please post you full build logs

As of the 24.05 release Armbian no longer uses the package cpufrequtils. It now uses that configuration file directly, and replaces the basic functionality that the package cpufrequtils formerly provided. So the Armbian hardware optimization service reads this file and applies the values to the system, and armbian-config is responsible to modify it.

On boot the system will apply the values from /etc/default/cpufrequtils to the running system (it is done by the armbian hardware optimization service)

You can manually set this info in /etc/default/cpufrequtils

https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16976-status-of-armbian-on-tv-boxes-please-read-first Don't expect wifi to work.

My last comment on this. The sad reality is that what the handful of volunteers that are Armbian produce is on average the best support out there for these boards. Many (I would even say most) of the other SBC builds out there take their code from Armbian and then add on a few things. You talk about 'companies', there aren't any that support these boards. The companies are the board manufacturers and they don't support their own products. You ask why Armbian is here, it is here because people like me have a bit of spare time and want to help and find these boards a fun and challenging hobby. But it is entitled people like you that make me not want to do this. Finally, you have no investment in Armbian thus Armbian owes you nothing. If you were paying for something here you might have a reason for your behavior. But you are using something provided to you for free, as is with no warranty. If it doesn't work then go find something elsewhere that you think is better (and good luck by the way). Or since this is open source you can always fix it yourself.

@holm The board you are using is not supported or maintained by Armbian. It is Community Maintained. That means that no Armbian resources exist to support this board. It is up to people outside Armbian to submit PRs to keep it alive. That is what it means when Armbian says it lacks resources to maintain hundreds of different boards out there. What Armbian provides to you free is infrastructure, automated builds and a forum. It is up to you or others who care about this (or any Community Maintained board) to submit PRs to keep it alive. I'm just a moderator of the forums trying to help. If you really want to complain to someone, instead of complaining to those of us here trying to help you for free (as I volunteer my time to receive the abuse you just gave to me), you should complain to the company that took your money for their board but then don't provide any software support for what they sold you. They just take your money and run, and hope others (like Armbian) will support their hardware without any compensation.

A quick look shows: Current u-boot sets CONFIG_GMAC_TX_DELAY = 1 (I didn't look at history if this has changed over time) (https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot/blob/ea722aa5eb33740ae77e8816aeb72b385e621cd0/configs/Cubietruck_defconfig#L11) and there is no patch in Armbian for Cubietruck that changes that value: (https://github.com/armbian/build/tree/main/patch/u-boot/u-boot-sunxi/board_cubietruck) It should be fairly simple to test different values to see if that addresses the problem and submit a PR to Armbian (or to upstream u-boot) to fix

Also, this thread seems to be similar to yours. I don't know if the board revision is the same as yours.

As the instructions say, you need to try all dtbs compatible with your cpu to find one that hopefully will work. Have you done that?

And finally going back to the original point, the only way to reset the box I would recommend is to reflash a fresh android firmware. I can't speak for the correct working of that coreelec script.

As the instructions say, you need to try all compatible dtbs for your cpu. Don't assume something from one os applies to another.

That doesn't make sense. Did you type something wrong there? s905 shouldn't use either of those uboots and u-boot-s905x2-s922 doesn't match either of those cpus.

Per the installation instructions, if you ever run another os (like coreelec) you will not be able to run armbian. You have to reflash a clean android environment to run armbian.