While there where some people asking on the NanoPi R4S thread about installing Openwrt onto the emmc I believe it make sense to open a new thread to avoid confusion.
I have openwrt running fine from the SD Card.
I tried to install the same version on the emmc via the friendlyelec webinterface but that seems not to boot.
Not sure if there need to be a patched uboot or other patches.
Anyone who already had success with it and has a imagebuilder recipe
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I got myself an R4SE for Christmas and I've had no luck getting OpenWRT onto the eMMC yet. I found this build which has the uboot patches from FriendlyWRT in it but flashing it to the eMMC causes it not to boot.
I'd love to help get this working but I'm not really sure where to start! I think I'll need to get a UART adapter so I can get the boot messages.
Welcome to the OpenWrt community!
Note that the R4SE is not a supported device of OpenWrt like the R4S is. As far as I recall, only booting OpenWrt from an sd-card works on the SE units. I'm referring to the official OpenWrt images. Friendlyelec has modified custom builds that they provide.
It would be great if you could work on adding OpenWrt support for booting from the emmc.
I'm writing from memory so take the following as ideas for things to look into.
I think FrriendlyElec uses a different boot program with their images for emmc and booting with the OpenWrt standard boot program is only supported on the sd-card. You may want to look at how the boot code is set-up and see what might be done. Note that official OpenWrt is fairly strict about keeping to open source with non-restrictive licenses so that may be an issue in trying to add a different boot program. If an easy modification can be made to the SE so it can use the standard boot program that could work. I typed "boot program", which may be u-boot but It might also be another part of the boot chain. Sorry - I don't have time to research that now but there is more details on this forum, the OEM wiki and other places on the web.
Good luck!
Welcome to the OpenWrt community!
Thanks!
Note that the R4SE is not a supported device of OpenWrt like the R4S is. As far as I recall, only booting OpenWrt from an sd-card works on the SE units. I'm referring to the official OpenWrt images. Friendlyelec has modified custom builds that they provide.
Yea, I wasn't under the impression that it was already supported =] Just thought it was worth a shot in case it just worked as the only difference between the R4S (which is supported) and the R4SE is the onboard eMMC and an optional unique MAC address chip (which I don't have).
I think FrriendlyElec uses a different boot program with their images for emmc and booting with the OpenWrt standard boot program is only supported on the sd-card.
Yea I think they use the Rockchip MiniLoader for the FriendlyWRT images. I found this table in their docs which I inferred to mean that if the eMMC has an image flashed with u-boot then it should boot from the eMMC. I took this to mean that u-boot is supported, possibly with some modifications. Maybe I shouldn't have assumed that to be the case.
I have an R5S with DietPi running off of the eMMC so I might try and see if I can learn anything from their boot process!
Unfortunately my only boot process experience is via GRUB2 or systemd-boot which isn't really helpful here.
Thanks again for taking the time to reply!
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Any recent updates/findings anyone?
Has anyone tested emmc SD card adaptor on R4S ?
https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product&path=83&product_id=271
no luck then
Any news here?
Got my R4SE - running with FriendlyWRT on eMMC
But i Want OpenWRT.
One Problem is - i dont know how to Erase the eMMC... so it just boots FriendlyWRT over and over...
Shure i can Press the Button on the side and it boots OpenWRT vom SD but if i (soft) reboot voila FriendlyWRT... 
Sorry for my bad English.
Toco
You wipe the eMMC when you boot another FriendlyElec OS on SD card, then you can run your OS on SD card.
From what I know, no one ever tried to make any progress on eMMC inside R4S, so you have no way to use it.
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Any solution to install on eMMC?
I saw that there are images for these two versions, which would be this enterprise edition?
FriendlyARM NanoPi R4S 4GB LPDDR4
FriendlyARM NanoPi R4S Enterprise Edition 4GB LPDDR4
Enterprise edition is just the R4S with EEPROM to have a Global Unique MAC Address, nothing to do with eMMC controller, so the short answer is: there is still no support for eMMC.
Correcting my typo...
What I bought was the R4SE, eMMC rom, I'll have to use it on the micro sd card, ok... Waiting for a solution to use it on the eMMC, thank you.
From what I understand, there is no open-source (vanilla OpenWrt) avail for NanoPi using eMMC bc the eMMC device is proprietary, hence need for a proprietary driver to use the eMMC.
The FriendlyARM version of OpenWrt includes the proprietary driver for use w the eMMC, so vanilla OpenWrt will never (cannot) support any eMMC device.
I myself asked many questions from this forum before buying the most appropriate version of NanoPi..... including a normal SD card & a "proper" unique MAC chip. With this hardware, my NanoPi booted first time correctly, has proven very reliable..... with my 5G ant/router "bridged through" to the NanoPi.
When searching for hardware, I was also considering the Compute / IO version (2 boards) of a Rasp Pi setup..... But decided in the end in favour of the NanoPi bc I intended to run the Wireguard VPN, & the NanoPi Rock chip apparently has support for VPN type encryption built into it. Rasp Pi has not paid for encryption support, so is not quite as good handling VPN encryption. I hope I described this sufficiently accurately. May be hazy on details.
You can still use SD card to boot R4SE, but then of course it's better to just buying the R4S since eMMC cannot be used.
For encryption, if you need OpenVPN then the Rockchip solution is better since you've mentioned that RPi foundation didn't pay for that acceleration, but it's not true for Pi5, however R4S has dual NIC by default it's better and cheaper for 1GbE router