I just got a new espressobin v7 with 2gb of ram. Output from working u-boot:

U-Boot 2017.03-armada-17.10.2-g255b9cc (Nov 07 2018 - 09:48:30 +0800)

Model: Marvell Armada 3720 Community Board ESPRESSOBin
       CPU    @ 1000 [MHz]
       L2     @ 800 [MHz]
       TClock @ 200 [MHz]
       DDR    @ 800 [MHz]
DRAM:  2 GiB
U-Boot DT blob at : 000000007f7161b8
Comphy-0: USB3          5 Gbps
Comphy-1: PEX0          2.5 Gbps
Comphy-2: SATA0         6 Gbps

...

Marvell>> sspi
SF: Detected mx25u3235f with page size 256 Bytes, erase size 64 KiB, total 4 MiB

Marvell>> version

U-Boot 2017.03-armada-17.10.2-g255b9cc (Nov 07 2018 - 09:48:30 +0800)
aarch64-linux-gnu-gcc (Linaro GCC 5.3-2016.05) 5.3.1 20160412
GNU ld (Linaro_Binutils-2016.05) 2.25.0 Linaro 2016_02

I'm trying to update to the latest u-boot version from here https://dl.armbian.com/espressobin/u-boot/  flash-image-ddr4-2g-2cs-1000_800.bin

 

Marvell>> bubt flash-image-ddr4-2g-2cs-1000_800.bin spi usb
Burning U-BOOT image "flash-image-ddr4-2g-2cs-1000_800.bin" from "usb" to "spi"
USB0:   Register 2000104 NbrPorts 2
Starting the controller
USB XHCI 1.00
USB1:   USB EHCI 1.00
scanning bus 0 for devices... ** First descriptor is NOT a primary desc on 0:1 **
2 USB Device(s) found
scanning bus 1 for devices... 1 USB Device(s) found
Image checksum...OK!
823492 bytes written, 65536 bytes skipped in 7.538s, speed 120754 B/s
Done!

So everything seems to go ok. From here, I reset the board and I get nothing at all. No serial console, nothing. I need to go into uart just to get any kind of a sign that the board is still alive. From uart I can recover using the following image from http://espressobin.net/tech-spec/ (U-Boot 2017.03-armada-17.10):

espressobin-bootloader-cpu-1000-ddr4-2cs-2g-atf-g39a62a1-uboot-g255b9cc-20181107-REL.bin

which brings me back to the initial state at the start of this post. Any ideas why flashing the latest u-boot image from armbian seems to completely bricks my board?

 

Thanks!

After further experimentation, I am able to flash the flash-image-ddr4-1g-2cs-1000_800.bin image and everything is back to normal, though I am restricted to 1GiB of RAM. Interesting since the official 2g image from espressobin.net works fine 

2GB RAM version has two 8Gb (1GB) DDR4 chips, but the DDR topology data from GitHub (which is used by Armbian for compiling u-boot) is wrong, and it causes failure.

 

In tim/ddr/DDR_TOPOLOGY_6.txt,

You should change

ddr_mem_size_index=5

to

ddr_mem_size_index=4

since it doesn’t have a single 16Gb chip.

On 12/8/2019 at 8:10 AM, Rainbaby said:

2GB RAM version has two 8Gb (1GB) DDR4 chips, but the DDR topology data from GitHub (which is used by Armbian for compiling u-boot) is wrong, and it causes failure.

 

@msmol I have corrected the error in DDR_Topology_6 as identified by @Rainbaby and recompiled flash, sata and uart images for the V7-2G EspressoBin (uboot version is still the same). 

 

Please let me know if the flash images now also work with the 2GB version of the V7 EspressoBin (download link).

 

EDIT: download link changed to dl.armbian.com

@ebin-dev, @Rainbaby Many thanks. I will try to flash the new image tonight and update this thread on how it goes.

@ebin-dev confirmed the new image works great. Thanks again!