Armbian supplied boot loader boots with a normal speed since several months. At least from SD/eMMC … don’t have SPI nor time to test / port it there so from our perspective, half a year means nothing since its 100% our time that is wasted.
I just did aan new install with the 5.10 kernel version of Armbian, following these instructions:
It’s now running on a kingston A2000 nvme drive with no SDcard installed. The only hickup I experienced is that the rockpi didn’t respond to this command:
Right forget this, device won’t boot anymore either. It worked on reboot, but doesn’t work after power cycle, I think.
I can’t be completely sure what happened as the power cycle was causes by the unit physically falling onto the ground, which destroyed the ribbon cable to the nvme tray in two places. System will no longer boot, even with the nvme directly attached. It also won’t boot from SD card, and won’t boot from SD card with GPIO pins 25 and 26 shorted.
I’ve been fiddling with this thing for months now, and I’m getting to the stage where I’m strongly considering switching to an x86 SBC for my project. Reliable booting, from a medium with a long lifespan like SSD, or even at all, just doesn’t really appear to be in the cards for the rock pi 4c.
Yes, Rock pi seems to be very sensible even to soft - and hard - handling, maybe soldering of the connectors, components, or something. I have had a lot of troubles with its hdmi connector, but for now it’s been working well for 2 months, with very delicate handling. As written somewhere I’m afraid that it’ll die if relocate it on the bookshelf…
I hadn’t noticed that it’s physically sensitive to handling, but then I think this is the first time I’ve dropped it. That kind of rules it out altogether, since I was planning to mount it in a car…