(08-19-2018, 02:26 PM)Catbot Wrote: Greetings everybody,

Today on my quest to enable the rock64 for my purposes I had just one goal:
Install upstream debian testing (buster) without any customizations.

Sadly I did not achieve this goal fully; However I believe I got extremely close. See below for the one bugreport I opened to have the last piece upstreamed.

So here are the steps from an existing debian system running on the board (mostly in pseudo-code because the difficulty level isn't novice):

0. Install U-Boot to SPI Flash
- https://github.com/ayufan-rock64/linux-u-boot/releases

1. Partition (e)MMC
 - 100MiB EFI partition (fat)
 - 1GiB boot partition (ext4)
 - 57GiB rootfs partition (f2fs)

2. mount filesystems
 - rootfs: /mnt
 - boot: /mnt/boot
 - efi: /mnt/boot/efi

3. bootstrap debian
 - debootstrap --arch=arm64 --variant=minbase buster /mnt http://deb/debian.org/debian

4. mount additional filesystems
 - mount -vt sysfs sysfs /mnt/sys
 - mount -vt proc proc /mnt/proc
 - mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
 - mount --bind /dev/pts /mnt/dev/pts
 - mount --make-rslave /mnt/dev
 - mount --make-rslave /mnt/dev/pts

5. install additional software
- tasksel ssh-server (this is a little messy in a chroot)
- apt install linux-image-arm64 grub-efi-arm64
- apt install ifupdown locales

6. configure system
 - /etc/initramfs-tools/modules: f2fs
 - /etc/default/grub: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="earlycon=uart8250,mmio32,0xff130000 console=ttyS2,1500000"
 - /etc/default/grub: if [ -z "$GRUB_DEVICE_UUID" ] && [ -n "$GRUB_DEVICE" ]; then GRUB_DEVICE_UUID=`blkid -s UUID -o value "$GRUB_DEVICE"`; fi
 - dpkg-reconfigure locales
 - dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
 - /etc/network/interfaces: auto eth0
 - /etc/network/interfaces: iface eth0 inet dhcp
 - /etc/network/interfaces: iface eth0 inet6 auto

7. make it bootable
 - update-initramfs -u
 - grub-install --target=arm64-efi --removable
 - update-grub
 - copy /usr/lib/linux-image-4.17.0-1-arm64/rockchip/rk3328-rock64.dtb to /boot/efi/rockchip/rk3328-rock64.dtb

At this point the system could be rebooted and should automagically start up through grub.However one piece is still missing:
When the DTB gets updated with a new debian kernel, the copy on the EFI partition has to be updated as well.
For this we use the debian specific flash-kernel application by adding the following entry to /etc/flash-kernel/db:

Code:

Machine: Pine64 Rock64
Boot-DTB-Path: /boot/efi/rockchip/rk3328-rock64.dtb
DTB-Id: rockchip/rk3328-rock64.dtb

This bit of magic makes sure that on every kernel update the rk3328-rock64.dtb gets copied to the EFI partition where U-Boot can load it *before* executing grub.
This is necessary because grub-mkconfig can not guess where the devicetree is and how it is called.
I have opened a bugreport against debian to have this piece included upstream: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=906696

I strongly believe that debian-installer could be used from a usb drive to install debian. It would be much easier than the instructions above, especially when a preseed file is used for automation.