Thanks @gandalf and @arne_f for the initial findings and recomendations to boot IPFire on expressobin hardware.
I have an 1GHz espressobin board (the regular, not the ultra version) which is confirmed to “only” come with one internal 1Gb duplex connection to an internal 3x1Gb ethernet switch, but it also has one separate mPCIe slot for an additional ethernet, Wifi, or SATA-controller. Unfortunately, the slot does not directly support mSATA cards. And there does not seem to be a (battery buffered?) real-time clock.
I hope for QoS to decently manage an (occasional) 900Mbit speed (backup/restore) between green<->orange, while routing the consumer grade VDSL home internet of red.
Not all my attempts to boot from sdcard and to follow your recommendations did work out.
But I could reproduce @gandalf’s boot method.
EDIT:
What I could not find out is how to manually (re)run the initial network gui (wiki.ipfire.org - Step 5: Network Setup), or to properly configure the 3 interfaces manually.
How were you able to configure the MACs etc. gandalf?
See solution below: Post #4 - “0). Booting”)
Trying the recommended .scr loading:
(not sure how this method works, I’ve set up armbian’s u-boot and environment):
(with addr from openwrt 18.xx example)
load mmc 0:1 0x4d00000 boot.scr; source 0x4d00000
→ this just rebooted u-boot
(with addr from armbian uboot example)
load mmc 0:1 0x6d00000 boot.scr; source 0x6d00000
→ Unknown command ‘bootz’ - try ‘help’
→ Bad Linux ARM64 Image magic!
Trying fatload from sdcard:
fatload mmc 0:1 ${fdt_addr} /dtb-4.14.212-ipfire/marvell/armada-3720-espressobin.dtb
fatload mmc 0:1 $kernel_addr vmlinuz-4.14.212-ipfire
setenv bootargs $console root=/dev/mmcblk0p3 rw rootwait
booti $kernel_addr - $fdt_addr
→ boots only until a message saying to wait for /dev/mmcblk0p3 (forever)
(kernel missing the driver?)
Trying fatload from usb 2.0 port:
fatload usb 0:1 ${fdt_addr} /dtb-4.14.212-ipfire/marvell/armada-3720-espressobin.dtb
fatload usb 0:1 $kernel_addr vmlinuz-4.14.212-ipfire
setenv bootargs $console root=/dev/sda3 rw rootwait
booti $kernel_addr - $fdt_addr
→ works
But now I’d need an idea how to redo and fix the network config.