Bug#879987: Netboot installation report for Banana Pi M3
On Sat, Oct 28, 2017 at 06:03:47AM +0200, Stefan Berzl wrote:
> Package: installation-reports
>
> Boot method: Put the files on an SD card an manually loaded them in u-boot
> Image version: http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/sid/main/installer-armhf/current/images/netboot/
> At the time of dowloading the image, the time column says "20:48 19-09-17".
> Date: 28-10-17
>
> Machine: Banana Pi M3 (https://linux-sunxi.org/Banana_Pi_M3)
> Processor: A83T
> Memory: 2GiB LPDDR3 @ 672 MHz
> Partitions: Never got past the initramfs, so here's df of that (the busybox
> version of df doesn't support -Tl)
>
> Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
> none 207052 48 207004 0% /run
> devtmpfs 1024196 0 1024196 0% /dev
>
> Base System Installation Checklist:
> Initial boot: [E]
>
> Comments/Problems:
> My u-boot is the master branch on 33fe271278 from Thu Oct 26 21:24:31 2017
> +0900 hosted https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot.git
>
> The linux kernel I used is master on 15f859ae5c43 from
> Thu Oct 26 23:04:14 2017 +0200
> hosted git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git
>
> The procedure is simple enough and doesn't differ too much from the tutorial
> on https://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/armhf/ch05s01.html.en
> Since u-boot has support for my device, creating the correct u-boot config
> could be achieved with make Sinovoip_BPI_M3_defconfig
> Putting the u-boot spl to the correct offset for me device is
> dd if=u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin of=/dev/${card} bs=1024 seek=8
>
> Then I formatted the SD card to contain one ext4 partition from sector 2048
> to the end of the card. It's 32 GB Samsung EVO Plus card. On the filesystem
> I put the vmlinuz and the initrd.gz that I got from the netboot installer I
> downloaded. Since there's no device tree for my device, I compiled
> a linux kernel with
> make sunxi_defconfig
> and put the device tree which is located in
> arch/arm/boot/dts/sun8i-a83t-bananapi-m3.dtb
> on the SD card also.
>
> Putting the SD card in my device, I navigated the interface with uart.
> Since u-boot supports the Banana Pi M3, certain variables are predefined.
> This includes the kernel address (kernel_addr_r), the device tree address
> (fdt_addr_r) and the ramdisk address (ramdisk_addr_r). ${filesize} on the
> other hand is automatically set for the file loaded last, so we have to
> load the ramdisk last. The sd card slot on the Banana Pi M3 is "mmc 0".
>
> => load mmc 0 ${kernel_addr_r} ${path_on_your_fs}/vmlinuz
> => load mmc 0 ${fdt_addr_r} ${path_on_your_fs}/sun8i-a83t-bananapi-m3.dtb
> => load mmc 0 ${ramdisk_addr_r} ${path_on_your_fs}/initrd.gz
> => setenv bootargs console=ttyS0,115200 rootwait panic=10
> => bootz ${kernel_addr_r} ${ramdisk_addr_r}:${filesize} ${fdt_addr_r}
>
> After this sequence of inputs, I got
>
> ## Flattened Device Tree blob at 43000000
> Booting using the fdt blob at 0x43000000
> Loading Ramdisk to 48b66000, end 49fff009 ... OK
> Loading Device Tree to 48b60000, end 48b65673 ... OK
>
> Starting kernel ...
>
> Nothing more happend, waiting several minutes. I suppose CONFIG_DEBUG_LL
> wasn't on in the vmlinuz I got, otherwise I might have received error messages.
>
> Not wanting to give up just then, I tried the zImage of the kernel I had
> compiled to get the device tree for my device. So only initrd.gz was from
> the debian site at this point, as vmlinuz and the device tree where
> self-compiled.
>
> To my surprise, it actually worked and I was greeted with the installer
> interface. Later the installer asked me for the ethernet driver, which I
> couldn't find in the list. It's dwmac-sun8i.ko, which is included in the
> kernel by CONFIG_DWMAC_SUN8I It's short description is
>
> Support for Allwinner H3 A83T A64 EMAC ethernet controllers
>
> Extracting the initrd.gz afterwards, I found that it really wasn't included.
>
> I didn't pursue the issue further, but maybe with slight changes to the
> kernel config, the debian installer could be used on this device.
Hello,
many thanks for your installation report. Our current Debian installer
builds are based on kernel 4.13, but both the device-tree for the
Banana Pi M3 as well as a number of drivers that are necessary for
supporting A83T-based systems are only available from kernel 4.14
onwards. Among the latter are support for the MMC controller in the
A83T as well as support for RSB (required for PMIC support), the PMIC
support itself, and USB support.
The situation with the H3/A64/A83T EMAC driver is a bit unfortunate.
The driver itself was included during the kernel 4.13 development
cycle, but as some issues with the devicetree bindings for the driver
have come up, they have been removed again before the final release of
kernel 4.13 and the discussion about how to handle this properly are
still ongoing. The driver author has sent in a new proposal a few days
ago, but the proposed changes haven't yet been accepted into the
upstream kernel and it is still unclear whether they will make it into
kernel 4.14, so for the time being, the driver is still unusable.
I am unsure regarding the missing console output without
CONFIG_DEBUG_LL. In theory the existing UART driver for older
Allwinner SoCs should work on the A83T as well. Could you perhaps
provide the output of "dmesg" on your board when booted with your
locally-built kernel with CONFIG_DEBUG_LL enabled? Perhaps we can see
something relevant in the kernel log.
Regards,
Karsten
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