Rock 5 ITX boot device

#1

Hi,
I’ve just got my Rock 5 ITX. Nice toy. :slight_smile:
I’d like to test different OSes and it would be very handy to either set the boot order or select boot device (either NVME or one of SATA drives) on start. Is it even possible on this board?
Browsed through the documentation, to no avail.
Would appreciate any hints.

#2

You’d have to install UEFI and GRUB. I don’t know if UEFI for Rock 5 ITX exists already (it exists for Rock 5b at least).

#3

Found somewhere here on forum, that it can be done by placing U-Boot and /boot on eMMC and cooking the config file (which, as I understand, means extlinux.conf), but at this moment can’t figure out what my computer is doing :confused: . Why it keeps loading different kernel than declared in extlinux.conf???
Need to read about the boot process. Found nice description (https://soliddowant.github.io/2024/01/23/rk3588-cluster-4), but it seems to not fully apply to my case – for instance there is no way to set the voltage of SARADC_IN0_BOOT pin on Rock5itx, is there?

#4

The boot order is kinda hardcoded, it’s probably trying to boot RoobiOS from the eMMC.

#5

Greetings,

Give this a try:

Appears to have a download for the ITX. I have tested the UEFI for the rock5b and it worked surprisingly well.

Good luck,

delmard

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#6

I continue to think that the suggested boot sequence on Rock 5 ITX is overly complicated, inefficient and unreliable as it involves too many moving parts (particularly Roobi which is just a full distro and not even something standard). An upgrade with a larger eMMC (say 32GB) to be used as the full boot OS storage would be so much easier!

In my case I installed the boot loader on the eMMC, as well as /boot. I know, that’s a waste of space but my full distro is almost 8GB and I didn’t want to start with a full file system :-/ Thus the OS is on an M2 SSD. The boot loader on the eMMC finds extlinux.conf from the eMMC’s /extlinux directory and there you can place as many boot entries as you want, and select which one you want at boot time, while letting the system boot the default one after a configured timeout.

There’s also EDK2 that seems to be supported for this board (though I never read a success report of it yet, I guess that once users manage to install their board they don’t want to try to change a boot loader “just to see”).

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