I need some guidance

ROCK 5 Series 5A
1

I admit my scarce knowledge of Linux, and almost a total ignorance of the Rock environment. So I am asking for some advice on what follows.

I have a Rock 5A board. I flashed a micro SD card with the Debian image, and everything works, the board boots normally.
Then I flashed the same image on a 32 GB eMMC module, and inserted it in place of the onboard SPI flash module.
Then removed the micro SD card, thinking that now the board should boot from the eMMC module… no way… reinserting the micro SD card the board booted normally, now showing the eMMC module as additional memory.

Of course my reasoning was wrong… is there a way to make the board booting from the eMMC module, or this is not a contemplated scenario ?

Thanks for shading some light on this.

2

It should boot but there’s a problem with eMMC on Rock 5A now. Look at the topics in the 5A section. There’s isn’t a real solution now, until the software is fixed we’re stuck with hacky solutions or SD cards.

3

We have pushed a new kernel (version 5.10.110-11) that contains a related fix. Can you try upgrade the kernel on your eMMC and run again?

To do so, first, boot from microSD with eMMC connected. Assuming the eMMC is listed under /dev/mmcblkX (substitute X with the real device number):

sudo mount /dev/mmcblkXp2 /mnt
cd /mnt
sudo wget https://github.com/radxa-pkg/linux-rockchip/releases/download/5.10.110-11/linux-image-5.10.110-11-rockchip_5.10.110-11-8c4e8d205_arm64.deb
sudo wget https://github.com/radxa-pkg/linux-rockchip/releases/download/5.10.110-11/linux-headers-5.10.110-11-rockchip_5.10.110-11-8c4e8d205_arm64.deb
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y systemd-container
sudo systemd-nspawn
dpkg -i /linux*.deb
exit
sudo poweroff

You can then remove the microSD card and try booting from eMMC again.

4

Thanks. I tried, but, first of all I had to prefix the two wget with sudo in order to avoid a permission error.
Done that, when issuing the command
sudo systemd-nspawn
I was greeted with a
sudo: systemd-nspawn: command not found
error message…

5

Since I have linked the previous comment elsewhere, I have updated the instruction above.

6

Thanks. I re-executed the script, but there was an error, showed in the attached screen capture.
Without the SDcard, the board did not boot, the blue LED did not light.

The dpkg command started a long sequence of make, rebuilding the kernel, but at the last one there was the error shown below, at the fourth line.

errmsg
errmsg2735×1141 1.67 MB

7

Tried again, after re-flashing a pristine image of Debian to the SDcard, to get rid of that broken RTL8192 driver.
This time I did not get the error previously reported, but just a warning shown in the screen capture below.
Anyway no luck… no boot from the eMMC, no blue LED…

warning|690x315