Libre Computer AML-S905X-CC eMMC Flashing Steps from Linux with pyamlboot

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I just got my eMMC working with my AML-S905X-CC and have some comments.

  1. I tried to use
    sudo pyamlboot/run.sh aml-s905x-cc ums-emmc
    but was getting the timeout even though I was on a Intel(R) Core™ i5-2400 CPU @ 3.10GHz runninb Debian 11. It turned out this was because I had plugged into my USB3 card. When I plugged directly into the Intel motherboards USB, it worked great! It got me wondering that perhaps if you have an AMD computer you could reverse the situation with a non-AMD USB board, you might be able to work around the AMD timeout problem.

  2. I was able to install debian-12 along with gnome and get the gui to work by running sudo tasksel. It turns out that since the board is based on Wayland because of framebuffer efficiency, xfce is not supported (yet?) and startx won’t come up. gnome came up fine.

  3. With my install on an SD card, i was able to install a system on the eMMC by running the SD os. I downloaded on of the images to the Downloads and then ran:

xzcat ~/Downloads/debian-12-base-arm64+aml-s905x-cc.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M conv=fdatasync status=progress

Then power off and remove the SD and the board should come up using the newly flashed image.

  1. If you want to go back to SD booting and don’t care about whats on the eMMC, you can just wipe out the eMMC by running

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M conv=fdatasync status=progress

This gets rid of your boot/EFI partition and some of the root partition. It should be enough to make the board ignore the eMMC when you poweroff and reboot with an SD card in place. You will get errors after it gets into zeroing the root partition so when you get that, just unplug the board. This part is a bit crude and I suppose we could add a count= parameter to dd. I have not tested the minimum about you need to zero to get the AML-S905X-CC to boot from the SD card.

I hope this info is helpful.

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