After five posts of breakthroughs and recipes, here is the calmer one. The "where are we, actually" post.
Two Remix Mini PCs sit on my desk — one with the original 16 GB eMMC, one that with the eMMC chip already removed — and both cold-boot Armbian on their own. Plug in power, wait about twenty seconds, see a login prompt. I recorded a short video of each, partly because it still feels slightly unreal that this works at all, and partly so anyone trying the recipe from the GitHub repo can see what success actually looks like before they spend an evening on it.
The videos
eMMC unit — cold boot from internal storage, nothing inserted:
No-NAND unit — same SD card as anyone could build from the repo recipe:
You see the same thing in each clip: power plug going in, the HDMI display lighting up, the Armbian login banner appearing on the screen. The eMMC unit has nothing inserted anywhere — no SD, no USB. The no-NAND unit boots from an SD card built exactly per the recipe in the repo. Same TOC0 SPL binary, same DTB, two physically different machines (one with the silicon, one without), both come up.
That is the whole project goal, finally on video.
What works today
Across both variants, the following is solid enough that I trust it for a real home-server / IoT-hub workload:
- Cold boot from internal media. eMMC for the eMMC unit; SD card for the no-NAND unit. No laptop, no FEL sideload, no manual button presses — just power.
- USB. Keyboards, mice, flash drives, USB-Ethernet dongles, 2.5″ external SSDs over a USB-to-SATA cable. All four ports work.
- HDMI. 1920×1080 at 60 Hz. Armbian splash, console, X if you install it.
-
WiFi. The on-board rtl8723bs over SDIO. 2.4 GHz only (the chip doesn't do 5 GHz), but reliable for SSH,
apt,scp, andresticover the local network. - Bluetooth. Same rtl8723bs chip, BT goes over UART1.
- The eMMC as a normal storage device on the eMMC unit, after the vqmmc-supply patch covered in post 1.
- Headless operation. Plug in power, ssh in, leave it on. The thermal behaviour matches what you'd expect — a small heatsink and the case stay warm-but-not-hot under sustained load.
- Power. Same 5V barrel adapter the device originally shipped with. No fan, no extra cooling, no surprises.
In short: everything you actually need for a small always-on Linux box is there.
What doesn't — and why
Two things genuinely don't work right now. I want to be upfront about both.
Wired Ethernet
The RJ-45 port is dead under mainline Linux. I spent a long, instructive evening reverse-engineering why, and the answer is interesting enough that it will get its own post — but the short version belongs here:
The Remix's Ethernet does not go to a generic external PHY like most Allwinner A64 boards. It goes through an AC200 companion chip that sits on i2c0 and contains the actual 10/100 Ethernet PHY (plus an audio codec and a TV-out block we don't use). The mainline kernel now ships drivers for this chip — it's used on a handful of H6/H616 TV boxes — and with the device-tree overlay I wrote, the AC200 fully initializes on the A64 Remix: the MFD driver probes, the EPHY-control driver probes, its registers come up with sane values, the right power rails (dldo1 for the chip, dldo2/eldo2/fldo1 for the PHY block) are switched on, the bandgap and calibration cells are read.
What stops it from finishing is one specific thing: the AC200's 24 MHz reference clock. On the H6/H616 boards where AC200 ethernet works, the chip is fed a 24 MHz square wave from the SoC over a PWM pin. On the Remix the factory firmware does not use a PWM for the AC200, which strongly suggests an on-board crystal — but reconstructing the exact clock net needs the board schematic, which isn't publicly available, and the FCC internal photos aren't high enough resolution to trace it visually.
So the in-progress overlay is in the repo, the AC200 chip fully initializes (which is, as far as I can tell, a first for the A64 + external AC200 combination on mainline), and the A64 EMAC's soft-reset times out waiting for a PHY clock that never arrives. Frustrating, but a clean stopping point. Anyone with a Remix schematic, or with the AC200 datasheet's bit definitions for the on-chip oscillator, could probably close this out in an evening.
Audio out the 3.5 mm jack
HDMI audio works. The headphone jack does not, at least not in the configuration I've tested. Lower priority for a headless server box, so I haven't dug in. Another known gap.
What this means for actually using one
For a small always-on box on the network — backups, file sync, the occasional cron job — neither limitation matters in practice. WiFi is plenty for restic over an external drive. HDMI is for the rare moment I need a direct console.
If you specifically need wired Ethernet, the honest answer right now is a USB-Ethernet dongle. A cheap USB 2.0 RTL8152 dongle costs less than a pizza, works out of the box on Armbian, and is limited only by USB 2.0 throughput — practically ~40 MB/s, which is plenty for anything but bulk LAN file transfer. Two of those are on the way for my own pair of units.
The two variants, side-by-side
| eMMC unit | No-NAND unit | |
|---|---|---|
| Boot medium | Internal eMMC (sector 16) | SD card (sector 16) |
| TOC0 SPL | Same binary | Same binary |
| Kernel + rootfs | On the eMMC partition | On the SD card |
| DTB | sun50i-h64-remix-mini-pc.dtb |
sun50i-h64-remix-mini-pc.dtb |
| WiFi / BT / HDMI / USB | Working | Working |
| Wired Ethernet | Not working (AC200 clock blocker) | Not working (AC200 clock blocker) |
| Audio out (3.5 mm) | Not working | Not working |
| Recovery boot | Insert the SD card | Re-flash the SD card |
A nice property of how this turned out: the same SD card image boots both variants. The eMMC unit's BROM tries SD first and falls through to the eMMC if no card is present; the no-NAND unit never had an eMMC to fall through to. One recovery card in a drawer covers both machines.
What comes next
The actual end goal — the reason I have two of these on my desk in the first place — is a backup system. Each unit gets an external drive over USB-SATA, both run scheduled restic to different tiers (daily / permanent / temporary), one of them additionally holds a full system snapshot of my main machine. WiFi-only is fine for the volumes involved; the USB-Ethernet dongle is the fallback for the big initial sync.
That setup is what the next posts will cover. The AC200 / Ethernet investigation will likely also get its own writeup — the work that went into it deserves to be public even though the result is "almost," because most of the unknowns I had to chase down (where the AC200 sits, which drivers it needs, which power rails feed it, how its calibration is plumbed, why the soft-reset hangs) would save the next person a long week.
The sticky-note version
- Both Remix variants work as a small Linux box today. Cold boot, WiFi, Bluetooth, HDMI, USB. Enough for a headless home-server role.
- Wired Ethernet doesn't work yet. USB-Ethernet dongle is the pragmatic answer; the AC200 work is documented and a single unresolved clock signal away from done.
- 3.5 mm audio doesn't work either. HDMI audio does.
- The same SD card boots both variants — one recovery image, one drawer, two machines.
- From "completely silent paperweight" to "cold-booting Linux SBC" is a real outcome. Two of them. The videos are the proof I owed everyone who read posts 1–5.
That's where the Remix Mini PC project sits in May 2026. Three years from the original "this thing is dead" assumption to two working units, two videos, and an open invitation for anyone with a schematic to finish the last 5%.
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