Hello, I’ve seen in the latest release Armbian now supports installing to UFS but can’t really see much information about going about this? I boot into the SD card and I’ve tried both installing a new copy to the UFS, which seems to do something but booting only gets as far as initramfs, and copying existing install from SD card which just fails with the following:

“No bootable install method is available for /dev/sda on this system (no EFI firmware, no
GRUB, and no board u-boot support).”

 

I have tried both Debian and Ubuntu minimal images on vendor and current kernels.

I did have a FriendlyElec image on there before but used Rkdevtool to erase the UFS module prior to trying again with Armbian. I’m wondering if anyone has had success with this? I saw a thread with someone struggling with Btrfs but I’m not able to get ext4 working.

Any help or instructions is appreciated, thanks

Edited August 21Aug 21 by Onion32

We ran into both of these bringing up UFS on our own RK3576 boards — they're separate problems:

Stuck at initramfs: nine times out of ten the root= device name didn't follow the move.
Drop to the busybox prompt and check cat /proc/cmdline — if root= still points at
/dev/mmcblk... while the UFS shows up as /dev/sda1, the kernel simply can't find the
rootfs. Fix is a one-liner in /boot/armbianEnv.txt (or the U-Boot env). If U-Boot gets
far enough to hand off to initramfs, the loader itself is fine, so don't re-flash
anything yet. "No bootable install method ... no board u-boot support": that message comes from the
armbian-install board database — NanoPi M5 isn't wired up for a UFS write target yet
(SD/eMMC paths exist, UFS doesn't). Copying the SD install won't work until that's added.
The workaround is manual: dd idbloader/u-boot.itb to the UFS at the correct offsets for
RK3576 (the loader layout on UFS differs from eMMC, so don't reuse eMMC offsets). One caution on RKDevTool:

erasing from it doesn't always clear the RK private header/IDB residue, which can leave a half-valid parameter block that confuses a later install.
rkdeveloptool with an explicit erase 0x0 of the first blocks is more reliable. Try the armbianEnv.txt root= fix first — it's the cheap one and probably gets you booting.