I have successfully gotten Armbian to boot from a USB flash drive on the Rock64 board.  Followed ayufan's instructions on how to update SPI Flash with his boot code and then wrote the Armbian Rock64 image to a USB flash drive.  All worked as expected. 

 

Thanks to everyone at Armbian for all the great work!

Hi jsfrederick, glad to hear it works for you, I think ayufan did some good progress in that area...

15 hours ago, Xalius said:

Hi jsfrederick, glad to hear it works for you, I think ayufan did some good progress in that area...

 

That he did! Hat's off to him.

Do you mean that the kernel and rootfs are located on USB drive and uboot (in spi flash) can load the kernel directly? Two questions:

 

1. is the kernel located in a separate GPT partition? or is it placed on a ext4 file system, such as /boot directory as most desktop or server distros do?

2. is usb hub supported? or the usb drive must be connected to the usb port directly?

 

And where is the guide from ayunfan as mentioned above?

 

I have seen this done with the Tinker board by adding a SPI flash to the GPIO header:  https://tinkerboarding.co.uk/forum/archive/index.php/thread-415.html

 

I would assume it is quite similar

9 hours ago, Ma Tianfu said:

Do you mean that the kernel and rootfs (including /boot with kernel image, dtbs) are located on USB drive and uboot (in spi flash) can load the kernel directly? Two questions:

 

1. is the kernel located in a separate GPT partition? or is it placed on a ext4 file system, such as /boot directory as most desktop or server distros do?

2. is usb hub supported? or the usb drive must be connected to the usb port directly?

 

And where is the guide from ayunfan as mentioned above?

 

 

Yes firmware+u-boot are on the SPI flash, only the rootfs is on USB or network...

 

check https://github.com/ayufan-rock64/linux-build/releases

 

https://github.com/ayufan-rock64/linux-build/releases/download/0.6.16/u-boot-flash-spi.img.xz

is a sdcard image that writes the bits to SPI

 

https://github.com/aw/linux-build/blob/2fec6745b584c2bbc5fbe15d4cbaacd62c096b24/recipes/flash-spi.md for the how-to

2 hours ago, Xalius said:

 

Yes firmware+u-boot are on the SPI flash, only the rootfs is on USB or network...

 

check https://github.com/ayufan-rock64/linux-build/releases

 

https://github.com/ayufan-rock64/linux-build/releases/download/0.6.16/u-boot-flash-spi.img.xz

is a sdcard image that writes the bits to SPI

 

https://github.com/aw/linux-build/blob/2fec6745b584c2bbc5fbe15d4cbaacd62c096b24/recipes/flash-spi.md for the how-to

 

Thank you. I will try it this weekend.