Tinker Board S boot from eMMC

1st Official Post

    Hello,

    I just got an tinker board S and was tinkering a bit around with it. At the beginning I had some set backs, deleted the eMMC partition and some other minor issues, but I got that fixed with the debianOs for tinker and a partition manager.

    I use the last (2018-07-05) tinker board image from here and it works alright with the knowledge that it is just a test version and still in the making. Thanks for that, first of all.

    A issue that I noticed right away, was that HDMI-CEC seems to not work and issues with setting up a Network storage, but for that I found a way around.

    The issue that bothers me right now is, that I am not able to set up the eMMC properly. And I am not sure why. The above mentioned image flashed by the libreelec tool or etcher to the sd-card works fine so far, but the image flashed to the eMMC is not recognized and does not boot. I tried all jumper positions all the time, nothing works.

    Do I miss something?

    Will there a be different image for the S Version? Properly not.

    Anything else I missed, have to say that I am quite a Linux novice.

    For any hints I am grateful. Thanks in advance.

    • Official Post

    TinkerBoard S and non-S are close enough in spec that we should be able to provide a single image for both. Current focus is on getting the core features like audio/video working properly so there hasn't been much attention on installation packaging beyond ensuring test images boot from an SD card. RK support is progressing but things are still in early stages.

    Hi

    Thanks a lot for the quick response. I was under the assumption that I did something wrong since it worked on sd-card but didn't on the eMMC drive.

    I have to be patient until the RC I guess. ;)

    Thanks a lot to you and all they distribute to that project and keep up the great work. :thumbup:

    • Official Post

    In my experience the advantage of moving the boot partition to eMMC/USB/eSata etc is limited - yes it takes slightly longer to boot, but most LE systems are 24/7 so any advantage is negated.

    However, what does make a difference is moving the /Storage usually the partition called "root" or "LIBREELEC_DISK" or "Storage" on later AML. to eMMC. This is what I did on a AML S905x Here

    It may not work for you but might give you some pointers

    Thanks Iridium.

    For now I changed my setup to the debian tinkerboard OS with Kodi in the autostart on the eMMC. That seems to work so far. Not as smooth as I hoped for, but in line with my other Libreelec and Kodi and MariaDB setup.

    I am most likely not finish testing different setups (Maybe tinkerboard with android is an option as well) and I will try out your storage move proposal too.

    At the moment the tinkerboard S feels a bit clunky (not just libreelec, also with other software) and not as smooth as my raspberry pi, but I guess it will get there in a near future.

    Quote from chewitt

    Rockchip support is still "work in progress" but hardware video decoding definitely works.

    I think Nerd was not refer to LibreELEC but TinkerOS + Kodi, no hardware video decoding on that combination for sure unless Kodi/ffmpeg is compiled specifically with rkmpp support. So far I cannot figure out how to do so although by investigating LibreELEC build scripts already gave me a lot of hints.