how to write and boot from eMMC:
- boot from SD
- umount /dev/mmcblk1p1 /dev/mmcblk1p2
- dd if=xxx.img of=/dev/mmcblk1 bs=10M
- sync
- power off & remove SD
- power on with eMMC
To follow this ‘tutorial’ you would either need an USB thumb drive of at least 8 GB size (maybe 16 GB if the image won’t fit) or an SD card of at least 16 GB size since you need to transport the OS image to the board.
In case you’ve a second host running Linux or OS X (or Windows and you know how to deal with PuTTY beyond basic stuff), another approach is to use a pipe through the network to overwrite /dev/mmcblk1 as outlined here: http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/474-quick-review-of-banana-pi-m3/?p=3023
Then there’s no need for temporary 8 GB storage.
Also if you would provide your OS images in a sane way (as small as possible by using sfill and appropriate compression, on Github at one location per SBC, together with an appropriate Readme.md) then you could advise users to do it this way (again without the need for temporary files!):
wget -O - "https://github.com/BPI-SINOVOIP/images/Some.img.7z" | 7z x -si -so | dd of=/dev/mmcblk1
The very same way you could provide updates for your OS images (hardware initialisation and the like – you know what I mean). But you simply don’t care about anything else than selling hardware.
Does this really work for sure? I have been asking for eMMC boot solution, but I have not gotten an answer yet.