orangepi-pc BROM only considers SPL at 8 KiB offset, but not at 128 KiB
The orangepi-pc is based on an Allwinner H3. According to the Linux Sunxi wiki and U-Boot docs, the boot ROM in the SoC checks for a valid header identifying the SPL under two addresses in the SD/eMMC flash: at address 8 KiB (sector 16) and address 128 KiB (sector 256):
Newer SoCs (anything later starting from H3, including A64/H5 and T113) can also load the SPL from sector 256 (128KB) of an SD card or eMMC 1
Newer SoCs (starting with the H3 from late 2014) also support booting from 128KB 2
Booting U-Boot with integrated SPL (u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin) at offset of 8 KiB from an SD image does indeed work in QEMU:
dd if=u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin of=sd.img bs=8k seek=1
qemu-img resize -f raw sd.img 16M
qemu-system-arm -machine orangepi-pc -drive file=sd.img,format=raw -nographic However, doing the same with 128 KiB offset does not boot in QEMU:
dd if=u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin of=sd.img bs=128k seek=1
qemu-img resize -f raw sd.img 16M
qemu-system-arm -machine orangepi-pc -drive file=sd.img,format=raw -nographic I'm using QEMU to quickly iterate on a hobby project around embedded Linux on old ARM Hardware (currently toying mostly with Armv7a), and I'd like to have GPT, without a hole in the table, thus the 128 KiB offset is desirable for me. Also I was quite impressed that the SD image boots just as is in QEMU without hickup when using the 8 KiB offset, kudos!