150balbes does not use git properly so he has made it extremely difficult to see what changes he has made in Armbian.
if you have access to UART by soldering a header then you should be able to interrupt the u-boot process and enter the commands in aml_autoscript and boot CE.
I don’t believe the bootloader is locked, they have probably just disabled booting from external unless you use the above method but without a device to hand then I would not be able to confirm this, I have been able to do this on another device though that was similar.
Maybe you are right, but I thought a locked bootloader is a requirement for getting DRM keys - and after unlocking the bootloader you will lose your DRM keys.
Would be great to have booth: CE with DRM keys and Mi Box would be the best 905 Box you can buy
I’m not sure on that but the Minix U9-H doesn’t have a locked bootloader and you don’t lose the DRM keys by installing CE or any other O/S as they are saved on a separate partition dedicated for them as are most if not all Amlogic devices.
Ah, I did not know that Box. But Mi Box has also Play Ready 3.0 + Google Widevine Level 1 and is half of the price. If it would be work with CE I would buy this Box instant
NOTE: I believe other Armbian builds do successfully load the kernel, but it fails from there, so I assume some sort of kernel/hardware problem and not a fault of the bootloader
Yeah, that’s the thing I don’t get. I never expected to boot anything other than the signed Xiaomi firmware, but that Armbian image does boot… so I’m stumped
One thing I noticed (mind you, the amlogic platform is new to me) is that the armbian builds don’t ship a dtb.img on the root. It is referenced in the autoload script (and fails to load), but I think it might be loaded later by the initrd instead of uboot.
hi, boot.img is normally signed by activating the function CONFIG_AML_CRYPTO_IMG in uboot. Before compiling, copy boot.img to board /amlogic/gxl_skt_v1 and build uboot. Then you get boot.img.encrypt in uboot/fip. I’m not sure why the Armbian kernel could be loaded yet. Has the manufacturer not regenerated the RSA / AES key and used default key? Is only a guess.
Secure boot requires a kernel image to be signed using an AMLogic tool called secureTool which we have available and if this is the case we could create an image specific to Xiaomi boxes.
From what I can make out there BL is burned/flashed to efuse and secure boot flag is then set which is irreversible then.
boot.img is then signed and this is used to boot the system.
Without the keys that Xiaomi used we obviously can’t build signed images unless Xiaomi used the standard certificates but it’s been a while since any OEM did this.
Strange still that Armbian can boot because they are not using signed boot images.
