User Guide for AML-S805X-AC (La Frite)
Overview
La Frite is a low cost ARM64 computer capable of booting from USB storage devices and Libre Computer eMMC modules. It follows standard boot processes much like x86 computers and supports booting EFI, syslinux, PXE/DHCP/TFTP.Firmware
The board will boot the embedded firmware (based on upstream u-boot) which will then attempt to boot from the peripherals attached to the board. For a detailed description of the boot process, please see the u-boot Firmware Guide. The firmware is updated periodically and you can flash the firmware from a computer.Images
Currently, Linux distro vendors have not release ARM64 EBBR compliant images but this is expected to change in 2020. You can find sample images we have put together on our public image site. We bootstrapped both Debian and Ubuntu images and you can look at the filesystem for an example of how to create compatible images.Flashing Image to USB
You can flash the extracted/decompressed image to a USB flash drive, USB card reader, USB hard drive (must be separately powered). We recommend using Win32DiskImager or command line if you are on Mac OS X or Linux. If you are not using Windows, make sure that the device is unmounted before flashing.Flashing Image to eMMC
The board can emulate a USB mass storage device which allows the eMMC module to be seen by a computer as a block device. You can find detailed instructions here.Considerations
The board has 512MB or 1GB of DRAM. Some GUI interfaces will consume more than this amount and will swap to disk resulting in slow performance.Images are built with Linux 4.19 stable with out of tree patches. Many of these patches are in Linux 5.4 which is the next LTS release arriving at the end of 2019.
Comments
And about the new LTS kernel, I assume you would be releasing a .deb image of the kernel for current images, as well as updated images with the kernel preinstalled. Is that correct?
Are you planning to launch firmware releases with newer uboot versions as well?