Pocket Reform Upgrade Sanity Check

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i wanted to check with someone from MNT or who knows the listings a bit better than i do to check my logic

presently i have a standard A311D Pocket Reform, MB 1.0, bought on christmas 2024, with my OS installed on a 2TB SSD with full disk encryption, and i want to upgrade it to the RK3588 but since i also want a MNT Reform classic and tariffs suck right now, i wanted to upgrade as follows:

buy MNT Reform 3.0 off crowdsupply with RK3588 16GB (avoids tariffs) > play musical SOMs between the Reform and Pocket Reform (thank you MNT for making this possible you wonderful people)

Question 1: now, i understand i will also need the headphone board, so am i correct in that i need to also buy the RK3588 upgrade kit off the MNT Shop directly, choosing the RCORE Carrier Board version? thus giving me the little board the RK3588 snaps onto and the new headphone jack board? and will that come with all the proper cables? (bonus points if you know roughly how much tariffs will apply)

Question 2: is there anything else i need to buy to put the A311D into the Reform classic when i get it or will it simply be plug and play hardware wise? (regardless of flashing)

Question 3: am i correct that for the new Reform classic, reflashing an SD card with the proper image (trixie, A311D, Reform classic) and getting that installed using the reform-tools to do an eMMC bootstrap (don’t know the exact command) will get me ready to go with a fresh install on eMMC?

Question 4: for my Pocket that’s had a freaky friday treatment with the RK3588, am i correct in thinking that i’ll be able to flash an SD card with Debian trixie, then do reform-encrypted-nvme-bootstrap (that’s the right command i think) while booting off the SD card and have it flash all the correct things (kernel image, and so on) or is there more i’d need to do? ideally i don’t want to have to move my data off the SSD and reformat and copy it all back over, but i don’t know if the reform-tools are set up to do that properly and automatically? i’d imagine so since MNT stuff seems to be designed with shenanigans like this in mind but still wanna make sure. if the worst thing i have to do is move stuff off the SSD then move it back after the reform-encrypted-nvme-setup i’m perfectly happy with that.

Question 5: should i bundle adding barebox into flashing my Pocket with the new RK3588 or can that be done later? alternatively will it make question 4’s process easier to install it as part of that or even before?

just wanna check all this since i’m doing some budgeting in advance and wanna have all the relevant information, get my ducks in a row as they say, so i can order ASAP. thanks in advance for any and all help provided, and thanks again MNT for making something this chaotic perfectly feasible.

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I can answer the reform.debian.net related questions:

Do you mean reform-flash-rescue? That script will flash your eMMC with a system image but that system will not be encrypted.

Do you mean reform-setup-encrypted-disk? That script will set up your SSD with luks encryption. Since reform-tools version 1.69 it should also be possible to use that script to set up emmc with full disk encryption. In Trixie you have 1.71.

You probably mean reform-setup-encrypted-disk. Here is the part of the Reform Handbook which talks about the tool:

And yes, you can use Debian Trixie with RK3588 but many important parts will be missing (most notably, you will not have display output). I don’t recommend that you use RK3588 with Trixie and you can read about that in this table:

You can keep your encrypted SSD and flash eMMC with a new /boot partition after swapping out your SoM by using the tool reform-emmc-bootstrap:

My recommendation is to install everything the normal way first. Then you can zero out the bootloader part on emmc (for example by using reform-flash-bootloader --zero emmc to make sure you don’t nuke your /boot) and flash an sd-card with u-boot and another one with barebox. If barebox works from sd-card, you can flash it to emmc and no longer require an sd-card to boot.

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yeah this is what i was after, since /boot is the only thing on the eMMC right now, and is, i believe, the only thing i need to change after swapping the SOMs amongst the Reforms, correct? what i think i want is to just change what’s on the /boot, so how would i go from where i’d be after buying the hardware and being at Point A:

Pocket Reform with Trixie-Backports on A311D, /boot on eMMC, / on encrypted nvme

new MNT Reform with RK3588

to Point B:

MNT Reform with Trixie-Backports on A311D with /boot and / on eMMC

MNT Pocket Reform with /boot on eMMC, / on encrypted NVME (NVME contents being unchanged from Point A)

am i correct in thinking that for the Pocket, i’d just flash an SD card, then setup the eMMC as /boot, and then reboot, and it’ll use the eMMC for /boot, and open the root at my NVME? (got more experience since making this post with the uboot stuff, so i think i understand a lot better.) or would using the bootstrap move the OS too, and i’d then use the reform-setup-encrypted-disk to tell it to move root after? all i want on eMMC is /boot.

then for the classic Reform, i’d just flash an SD card, and boot off that, then run a command to move the entire OS to eMMC? (if so, which command? or do i just do the bootstrap and it’ll ask if i want just /boot or the whole thing?)

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No, you also have to tell configuration files in your rootfs that /boot is now elsewhere. You can do this manually or let reform-emmc-bootstrap do it for you. If you want to know more, read the script.

Yes, you can use reform-emmc-bootstrap to automate that. There are other forum posts about how to do it manually. If you want to do it manually I can try and dig that up.

No, as the name implies, reform-emmc-bootstrap only bootstraps the emmc. It essentially wipes it, repartitions it and then fills it with the right contents to boot your encrypted system on NVMe. Note, that reform-emmc-bootstrap cannot handle all kinds of diverse setups. You should be fine if the system was created using reform-setup-encrypted-disk but if you did the setup manually, maybe it will unable to configure the eMMC for you.

When you run reform-emmc-bootstrap please make sure to take a complete copy of its terminal output so that you can share it here in case there are errors!

If you don’t have any data you want to keep on the classic reform then you just run reform-setup-encrypted-disk which will set up your SSD and eMMC to boot using full disk encryption with luks.

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thank you! this is perfect, all what i was hoping to hear. i’ll report back with logs if i need further help. now all i need to confirm is that ordering the upgrade kit with headphone board is correct and i’ll be good to go