On 2021-02-02, Michael Fladischer wrote: > I inherited a Rock Pi 4A v1.4 from a co-worker who ran Armbian on it. > There are two storage devices present: One eMMC 16GiB module an one M.2 > NVME 128GiB module, which I haven't used yet. > > I wrote the combined image from [0] to the eMMC and powered it on with > the USB-TTL cable connected. The installer worked perfectly fine, > installing everything to the eMMC module. I made it use mmcblk2p1 as > ext4 mounted on /boot and mmcblk2p2 as btrfs on /. > > Then the installer mentioned that there is no boot-loader to be > installed and I let it reboot the board. As expected, it found no > working boot configuration. It is a confusing message in Debian installer, as it has less to do with a bootloader, and more to do with the way the bootloader loads a kernel and other related boot files... in this case it means there is no support in the flash-kernel package for this board. There is a merge request for flash-kernel to fix this; I was intending to merge in a few minutes: https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/flash-kernel/-/merge_requests/25 > I managed to hand-craft the extlinux/extlinux.conf file onto the > /boot-partition and now the board successfully booted vanilla > Debian/unstable. > > Now my questions: > - What is the necessary to support the installation of a boot-loader > in the installer? Is it the missing entry in the u-boot db? > - Is using extlinux/extlinux.conf the preferred way to boot a Rock Pi > 4? I noticed that this is the way the installer starts. I find u-boot-menu to generate an extlinux.conf a preferable way, but I don't think there is currently support in debian-installer to use u-boot-menu instead of flash-kernel; it only works with flash-kernel currently. It would be really nice to make that an option during the install process, though maybe a bit late in the bullseye release process... > The system is up at the moment but I noticed that it takes several > attempts to get it fully booted. Roughly 80% of the time it will hang 7 > seconds after the kernel has started. The printk messages are not really > helpful as it stops at a different line each time. Is there anyone else > running Debian on a Rock Pi4 and has experienced a similar behaviour? Does the Rock PI4 initialize USB during the boot process? There were issues with USB on pinebook-pro-rk3399 and rockpro64-rk3399. It could be a similar issue: https://bugs.debian.org/980434 https://bugs.debian.org/973323 live well, vagrant
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