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@sven-ola there are 3 ways to boot the R2S: 1. Press the boot button before applying power. White USB port connected to a PC. Apply power. It goes into fastboot mode like an android. Theoretically this should let you flash the on-board eMMC. I can successfully put it in fastboot mode but the flashing has not worked. 2. Boot from eMMC 3. Boot from USB. The eMMC has two boot partitions that are fixed size and one large main partition. My project uses the u-boot environment but also does a few minor things. It prioritizes USB if it finds a bootable medium there. It also safely flashes the boot blocks on the eMMC and then the main blocks. It adds some safety checks before flashing. Nothing else.

The R2S has an internal eMMC and a USB port. After debugging the default u-boot scripts I found that it does not boot from USB once you have Armbian installed on eMMC. To reinstall a fresh copy of Armbian or any other OS, you have to use the fastboot based KyTool which does not usually work on a modern Windows PC with USB 3.0 ports. So you could end up in a state where you have to manually interrupt U-boot, or worse if you corrupt the eMMC. I rewrote the u-boot flow on the R2S. I also cleaned up the nand-sata-install and added a lot of safety checks. It will look at USB and boot from there. After that you can safely install to eMMC. Below is the link. Please let me know if it is worth submitting a PR. The changes will not touch anything in the main system, it adds these scripts to /usr/local/lib and /usr/local/sbin. https://github.com/arvindmaxar/u-boot-tools

@sven-ola The nightly is on 6.19 without headers, so I can't build any additional drivers. The nightly is working on the R2S with ethernet ports and no heating issues, no load average problems. How do I get a 6.18 build (Current)? Thanks.

@sven-ola Nightly build fixed the load problem and heat problem on R2S: linux-image-current-spacemit/now 26.2.0-trunk.574 riscv64 [installed,local] Armbian Linux current kernel image 6.18.18-current-spacemit This is my current uname -r: 6.18.18-current-spacemit

> apt search linux-headers linux-headers-6.19.6+deb14+1-common/testing 6.19.6-2 all Common header files for Linux 6.19.6+deb14+1 linux-headers-6.19.6+deb14+1-riscv64/testing 6.19.6-2 riscv64 Header files for Linux 6.19.6+deb14+1-riscv64 linux-headers-riscv64/testing 6.19.6-2 riscv64 Header files for Linux riscv64 configuration (meta-package) > uname -r 6.18.18-current-spacemit

I installed 6.18.18-current-spacemit from the nightly but can't find the headers package to build the GPU support. The repo has 6.19.x headers but no 6.18.x headers.

Managed to edit the MMC by booting from USB, mounting the MMC. The R2S is now up and running, with the mainline armbian. However, the CPU still spins in the kernel and generates a lot of heat. Idle load average is 2.02.

I ran into some trouble. I managed to boot the USB and then used armbian-config to flash the image to internal eMMC. However the script copied the USB UUID instead of the MMC UUID so now the MMC won't boot. I need to edit the MMC and change the UUID.

Thanks for the script @sven-ola. I got the R2S booted from USB. I had to tweak a few minor things. Where did you get the Ubuntu boot.cmd? usb start setenv devtype usb setenv devnum 0:1 setenv prefix boot/ setenv fdtfile dtb-6.6.99-legacy-spacemit/spacemit/x1_orangepi-r2s.dtb #setenv fdtfile spacemit/k1-orangepi-rv2.dtb setenv bootargs "console=ttyS0,115200 root=/dev/sda1" ls ${devtype} ${devnum} ${prefix} load ${devtype} ${devnum} ${ramdisk_addr_r} ${prefix}uInitrd load ${devtype} ${devnum} ${kernel_addr_r} ${prefix}Image load ${devtype} ${devnum} ${fdt_addr_r} ${prefix}/${fdtfile} booti ${kernel_addr_r} ${ramdisk_addr_r} ${fdt_addr_r}

Thank you. R2S has a built in eMMC and USB. The only way to get a new image is to boot from USB but it seems like I have to manually load the image in u-boot. Is the u-boot script (boot.txt) for the build somewhere in GitHub?

I ran into a problem. Flashed the nightly build to the eMMC on the R2S and now it won’t boot from USB. I can see the usb drive in u-boot and kernel.img and dtb. What’s the default address to load the kernel and dtb on these boards? thank you.

In the meantime I brought up an access point server using the nightly armbian build. So far it is running solidly. The WiFi is underpowered, while the rest of the system seems stable.

Excellent. Thank you so much. I will try the newer brcm driver today. So the GPU change is now in main?

I setup a fresh install on the RV2 using the pre-built Forky binary. Everything works stably but the idle load average is very high all the time: armbian@orangepirv2:~$ uptime 09:22:27 up 13:30, 1 user, load average: 2.00, 2.00, 2.00 Looks like the bug that cause the kernel to spin is still there.

Thanks @sven-ola. I will give that a try. The standard Armbian is unable to connect to an WPA3 access point in basic client mode (no AP). It connects fine to WPA2-Personal.