Hi,

 

I have a basic doubt regarding the booting of multiboot vs armbian

 

Multiboot gets booted from sdcard even if the tv box has Android.

 

If multiboot can do it, why not armbian.

 

I can see multiboot has vfat partition having kernel file. And another partition as ext4 that had Linux files.

 

If we make armbian by modifying the initrd,  will it get booted like multiboot, without erasing Android and not loosing Android functionality.  It will be like dual boot also.

 

 

 

7 hours ago, vkkindia said:

Hi,

 

I have a basic doubt regarding the booting of multiboot vs armbian

 

Multiboot gets booted from sdcard even if the tv box has Android.

 

If multiboot can do it, why not armbian.

 

I can see multiboot has vfat partition having kernel file. And another partition as ext4 that had Linux files.

 

If we make armbian by modifying the initrd,  will it get booted like multiboot, without erasing Android and not loosing Android functionality.  It will be like dual boot also.

 

 

 

I guess you mean multitool and not multiboot.

The answer to the question is yes: armbian could boot the same way the multitool do.

These are the reasons behind the choice to not have such option:

• the boot stack is the same for all the boards -> easier support and debugging
• mainline u-boot
• mainline ATF (proprietary ATF does not allow rk3318 to run > 1.1 Ghz)
• except for ddrbin, boot stack is totally known open source software; features can be added as needed - USB boot support, for example, but also imminent support for boards which have swapped sd card controller that at the moment don't boot from sd card in any way.
• ddrbin can be updated as long as new versions appear

 

What we lose:

• sdcard boot from original Android
• ddr scaling due to mainline ATF (but we see that proprietary ATF does non desiderable things like limiting the CPU frequency artificially, will be addressed sooner or later)

 

The responsible for sd boot is the rockchip miniloader, initrd is not involved at all in the process.