There is no need to reinstall. We are only talking about the boot loader. Use an extra SD Card and dd the spi flash archive onto it. Then boot the extra sd card and let it replace your current u-boot image that resides in SPI Flash memory. Then you should have the ability to use USB keyboards in uboot without a serial console.

Heya mralk3, Great News!
It took me awhile due to my n00bishness w/ ARM and I screwed it up once not understanding the exact nature of the boot process so I had to re-install.

Much to my great and extremely pleasant surprise, electing to not format almost ALL my tweaks were still there including Users, Desktops, and app settings... Awesome!

During re-install I naturally did not have eMMC drive connected so I added a dummy menuentry for eMMC until I could reboot and get everything right. For one thing I have no idea if UBoot will behave anything like LILO and recognize a chainload like "other = /dev/foo, label = foo2" BUT USB keyboard working is CONFIRMED and it is delightful. Major imrovement for me and possibly anyone else that wants some flexibility to "mess around" to learn stuff.

Thank you very much. Excellent option!

EDIT (UPDATE) - Well ideally I need to figure out how to install Grub2 into AarchSlackware (I don't see it in /sbin or /usr/sbin) or to effect a "handoff" boot to eMMC. I'd like to be able to have that option wide open to boot whatever it finds bootable on an eMMC regardless of which eMMC I connect. I know grub can work on the RockPro64 as I've seen and used it in other distros. That would be a case where the OSProber might be welcome.

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The u-boot binary will read from ext2/3/4 and type vfat partitions. I booted OpenBSD a while back using a Slackware U-Boot. OpenBSD uses a fat partition to house u-boot stuff. So as long as you keep those file system types in mind, you can probably boot mostly everything *NIX, as long as the RockPro64 is listed as supported for the operating system in mind. The only catch is that u-boot must support the hardware and have been compiled for it.

My obstacle so far is not file systems but handing off boot to another drive ie: eMMC. I've tried adding a directory in Slackware's /boot (like /boot/eMMC/*) so I can keep all the kernels, configs, dtb stuff, etc separated but still in Slackware's /boot. So far no luck.

For example i copied lines like this
and I get many errors ----
Ignoring unknown command root=
Ignoring unknown command LINUX
Ignoring unknown command INITRD
Ognoring unknown command FDTDIR

and if I select Option #2 (eMMC)
it says no kernel found

I'm stuck for awhile but leaning on trying to find out how grub can be loaded to avoid all these (new to me) arcane errors. I don't get it yet as those commands are not unknown for Slackware's boot entry. What am I missing?

Incidentally I tried copying and customizing the APPEND line to define root for the #2 EMMC entry but to no avail

Some examples.


Assuming the kernel and bits are in the eMMC/ directory on the SD Card, no need to add /boot since u-boot sees the SD Card as /. Here is what mine looks like for the default boot option. Uses LUKS and LVM encryption and a UUID to point to the encryption key file. "LABEL" needs to be unique from other entries.
You can also program u-boot to load the right files from the right disk and partition directly. A good alternative if you cannot figure out extlinux.conf.

TYVM again mralk3. I'll play with that even though for some reason the RockPro64 has reverted and I can't see why but I'm glad for whatever changed. It now starts and displays the Slackware Uboot and when eMMC is not attached but MicroSD is attached, it always boots right to Slackware. If I attach the eMMC and detach the MicroSD it sometimes tries to load Slackware and fails (I think when warm rebooted) but when hard started, boots whatever is on eMMC after Slacware Logo page.

I'm trying to craft a hybrid system with Slackware that has a true Desktop variant but will also operate as a Web Based NAS most of the time. OpenMediaVault has a TrueNAS-like interface that's really nice but it runs a 4.4.167 kernel and though I'm not certain that is the problem it doesn't like my BTRFS RAID1 and claims 2 records don't match which is odd since Slackware sees no errors and transfers files back and forth with zero errors while OMV won't even let me mount it. So even if I wasn't a 2 decade devotee of Slackware, I'd still prefer it over the faulty Stretch Debian.,, but I surely would like to have that web interface on Slack. I'll get there. Thanks again.

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I have my RockPro with NFS using autofs to mount/unmount the network shares on demand. I have Apache (httpd) running as a Slackware mirror sharing just my Slackware repositories. Good for browsing files too and I manage everything by secure shell. I have plans to make a web interface as time permits.

Post back here if you find a good low resource web interface.

Just to be clear I don't mind CLI type NFS for rsync but I have so many drives/partitions on so many PCs that some stuff is just easier when I can use a FileManager and just drag 'n drop individual files, clusters of files or directories. I can manage something like that now but I'm pretty certain a web interface would make that much more comfortable and flexible. I tried to install Webmin on AarchSlackware but it stated it doesn't yet support the architecture and it failed to build. Cockpit is kinda OK but I haven't tried it on ARM yet. In the past I've used VNC variants like NoMachine and AnyDesk in X86 so I might try those.

Anyway if I see a decent one that works on AarchSlackware I'll post info here.

UPDATE - Well I don't think this is quite great news but it is some progress toward trying to adapt OpenMediaVault to Slackware and it does prove to be fairly low on resource usage. It began by discovering that even though I have updates enabled in OMV, it did not inform me of any kernel updates. I had to do that manually. So, now I've upgraded from the 4.4 kernel to the 5.9 kernel and RAID mounts just fine so it WAS the older kernel BTRFS module that was out of date, which makes sense since btrfs is evolving very quickly. I will actually be glad (I think) when ZFS becomes more common in Linux but that's another project.

OK so first off, mralk3, since I don't know diddly about apt-get I didn't know how to discover what updates actually are available, whether it would be possible to build a newer kernel perhaps based on the AarchSlackware kernel config, so in order to not spend weeks learning more Debian stuff I won't use much, I attempted to install a GUI on OpenMediaVault. It wouldn't let me install KDE or even Xfce so I was forced to install Gnome which I really don't care for, but it did help a wee bit. Now I've disabled it but of course some requirements are still running. Despite that, running htop shows an average of ~3% CPU usage and about 167MB of 4G of RAM usage while in Multi-User (basically like runlevel 3 in Slack) but also connected via the web interface on my Main PC. So, I think, not too shabby. Let me know if you think that's not reasonable resource usage for RockPro64. It feels good, especially after the kernel upgrade
.
It is running pretty damned snappy so I'm going to continue trying to adapt the Web Login and function to Slackware. Wish me good fortune.

That is a decent resource allocation. I have never used open media vault so I can't say for sure. My RockPro idles at around 180MB of RAM. I have other things running on it besides NFS like OSSEC, caching DNS for my LAN, distccd, and a quake 3 server with bots. I plan to migrate all those other services to another machine and run them in containers.

Just a quick update, mralk3

The new Uboot you created works a treat! Today I received a new eMMC and 2 x top notch MicroSDs. Basically Slackware still shows but everything boots. I can swap eMMCs or MicroSDs and all of them work even when they have Grub2 menues, and Slackware now has real, selective multiboot.

One of the new systems I tried was OpeSuse Tumbleweed server and added Cockpit. It was easy to setup and web login and administration works very well. It is odd compared to OpenMediaVault in terms of resource usage, a tradeoff. In similar conditions to the above mention ~3% CPU and ~167MB, Suse shows 0% CPU at idle and 300MB RAM... easy on CPU a bit rough on RAM.

I'll be trying others. I'd like to find a TrueNAS ported for ARM at least to compare BTRFS to ZFS.

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I am glad it works! The Slackware logo is baked into the u-boot binary when compiled. We weren't going to address multi booting other OS's, but editing extlinux.conf is fairly quick and easy. It's functions are well documented within the file.

Did you see the attached screenie of cockpit? Despite being very comprehensive it's resource usage as you noted is quite conservative. However I suspect I will be working a very long time to get a package built for Slackware as it has several dependencies not included in any debs or rpms I've seen. It;s gonna take awhile.

Yes. I have not used cockpit before. I am fairly proficient at programming Ruby web applications. I may make a sort of stripped down version of cockpit for personal use. Login form, a dash with sensor statistics, a way to check important logs, a page to control services, some sort of interface with smartd, and that is all I think I would need. I already wrote most of what I need and can borrow from other old projects I've made. The rest of what is needed can be done from the command line or serial console.

Although, it would be nice to handle software updates and have terminal window built in to the browser. Say you accidentally lock yourself out of SSH with iptables, or some similar scenario.

Lately I've learned a fair bit about the web interface from messing with Suse Tubleweed w/ Cockpit but it is a struggle mostly because I have to lookup everything for systemd protocols and commands. Some stuff translates though. However, after getting repeated "access denied" errors trying to mount server shares on my client box and having no luck discovering why, I figured my best bet was to go back into Slackware and just mount the share of the RAID locally via ssh, and create an entry for the share in Dolphin on my client Main box.

For some #**!!** reason mounting no longer works and I'm getting "access denied" on Slackware as well! Grrrrr. I've checked hosts, host.allow, exports, etc and even tried adding a temporary "insecure" to exports and still get denied. I must be overtired and should prolly quit for awhile and come back later. I just wanna be able to drag and drop selected files/directories as well as rsync. It did work and now it doesn't. Nothin' I hate worse than inconsistencies and intermittent gremlins.

Hope your day is going better than mine.

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