Assistance required - U-boot not working on Radxa Rock

[wulfgarfr+ubdlist at gmail.com]

Hi,

A little time ago I acquired a Radxa Rock (RK3188 SoC).
While it is an aging board, it is still quite capable and yet low-power.

However, the board I have is coming with a very old Linaro version on
the built-in flash.
Radxa does not really provide any recent builds, and the way the flash
is setup it can't easily be upgraded to a newer kernel or distribution.
The SD images provided on their website suffer the same problem.

The SBC is supported according to
https://docs.u-boot.org/en/stable/board/rockchip/rockchip.html#rockchip-boards

So I set out to build the latest U-boot release. And it build just fine.
But when written to SD card, the board just boots to flash instead.
It is capable of booting directly from SD (prioritized over flash boot),
as tested with an old Radxa SD image that I downloaded.

Apparently the built U-boot 2024.10 as written to SD is not recognized at
all by the board.

I would really appreciate any suggestions how to start troubleshooting,
or how to adapt the build.

Regards, Wolf


[1] U-boot SDcard build setup:
$ export CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabihf-
$ make rock_defconfig
$ make CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabihf-
$ export SDCARD=/dev/mmcblk0
$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=$SDCARD bs=1M count=1
$ sudo dd if=u-boot-rockchip.bin of=SDCARD seek=64

[2] Boot log with inserted U-boot 2024.10 SD card:
$ picocom /dev/ttyUSB0 -b 115200 -e w q
��� @� B�DDR Version 1.04 20130517
In
DDR3
300MHz
Bus Width=32 Col=10 Bank=8 Row=15 CS=2 Die Bus-Width=16 Size=2048MB
Memory OK
OUT
BUILD=====2
SdmmcInit=0 0
FwPartOffset=0 , 0
No.1 FLASH ID:2c 64 44 4b a9 0
OK! 226110
unsigned!
SecureBootEn = 0 0
Boot ver: 2013-12-02#2.08
start_linux=====230997
 3431345 Starting kernel... at 0x60408000

[    0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpu
[    0.000000] Linux version 3.0.36+ (build at radxa-x1) (gcc version 4.6.3 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.6.3-1ubuntu5) ) #10 SMP PREEMPT Sat Aug 23 16:11:52 CST 2014
[    0.000000] CPU: ARMv7 Processor [413fc090] revision 0 (ARMv7), cr=10c5387d
...