Hi,
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.
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.
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?
[0]
http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/unstable/main/installer-arm64/current/images/netboot/SD-card-images/
Regards,
Michael (fladi)
