Official Debian support

[moonwalkers]

I also tried to follow instructions and cannot run 5.10 linux image. Still have black screen. The good news is it was not necessary to reinstall Bullseye. Just boot from microSD, access /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf and modify the kernel to boot.

I also learned that /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf in Debian is not maintained by extlinux package, but by u-boot-update. That is why there is no possibility to choose interactively the kernel (am I missing something?).

Additionally to linux-image-5.10.0-7-arm64 and its metapackage linux-image-arm it was also installed firmware-linux-free package. Maybe this one was more important, there is also firmware-linux-nonfree and their metapackage firmware-linux.

Interesting... I think u-boot version may have an effect on whether boot is successful or not, because when I try to boot official Debian installation media on PBP it also boots to black screen, and the only difference between it and my working system should be u-boot. I'm not using the fully open-source build of u-boot, I use BSP u-boot by mrfixit (see the link in the first post). Until 5.10.38 kernel booting from microSD to edit /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf and point it back to xmixahx's 5.8.5 when Debian kernel is updated and fails to boot is what I was doing as well.

u-boot-update is the command, which is provided by the package u-boot-menu. As to the reason there is no possibility to choose kernel interactively - that depends on u-boot build, as there are some builds that do allow that.

I do have firmware-misc-nonfree package installed, I completely forgot to mention that. Like I said, it's been a while since I did the initial installation of Debian on my machine, and the only difference between getting it to work initially and having it working now is using official Debian kernel. Looking at the package contents, it has "Rockchip cdn DisplayPort controller firmware, version 3.1 (rockchip/dptx.bin)", which is the more probable explanation of the black screen if it is missing, though if I remember correctly that firmware should be necessary for the external display, not internal one... But then, if I understand correctly the issue with black built-in screen is related to initializing that very same DisplayPort controller.

I'm gonna see if I can add firmware-misc-nonfree to the SD card image and get the official installer to work that way for PBP.