Official Debian support

[alpopa]

The one I had installed then gives:
uname -r = 5.10.0-8-arm64
uname -v = #1 SMP Debian 5.10.46-4 (2021-08-03)

after update today
uname -r = 5.10.0-9-arm64
uname -v = #1 SMP Debain 5.10.70-1 (2021-09-30)

No change for the little testing I did.

Great !!!

I realized that I broke u-boot by choosing automatic disk partitioning. So, I repeated my test with Debian Installer (netinst from 4.10.2021 prepared according to README). I installed Debian 9 Stretch and updated it to get newer u-boot installed. Then I booted Bullseye netinst image and choose already existing /boot and / partitions (an leave the space for u-boot). The installer complained that the kernel cannot be installed. The next day I realized that inability to install the kernel is not due to broken installer image, nor due to inability to fetch it from the net, but rather due to too little space on /boot partition. So my next try was to give up the /boot partition and install all to one / partition. The installation completed and the system restarted. I can see the power led, so it starts for sure. However, no output to screen. This is exactly the same situation as if I install Bullseye with Daniel Thompson's script and then install official kernel from Debian repository.

Can you please help me what is missing on my side? Should I use different u-boot? (I tried several times to flash u-boot - from Debian and Manjaro - with no success. Probably I do it in wrong way). Should I recompile the kernel with each its update?

Please advise.

[malyessarah71]

No, it's not the exact output but it is that kernel version.

I have an EFI partition using systemd-bootd, which loads a loader config that has the /proc/cmdline--nothing fancy, initrd, ftd which points to the dtb on the efi partition, root, and rw mostly.

Can you share yours?

I see some examples (and the default Manjaro) shows a few video= arguments.

Do you have a /dev/fb0? I saw a kernel regression that this doesn't get setup when using EFI.

I'm also assuming you're doing extlinux boot?

You have a /extlinux directory on your boot volume?

Can you paste the output of it?

[alpopa]

I know Debian Thopson's script creates GPT partition scheme and EFI partition. In my tests custom 5.7 kernel (provided by the script) works fine, however Debian official kernel (+ its configuration in /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf updated by u-boot-update) does not have DP output. Have I to manually add some kernel arguments? In this case any kernel update will result in missing video output, because new configuration will be generated automatically. Unfortunately, I have no UART cable to see if I have /dev/fb0 device.

Debian Stretch by mrfixit uses MBR partition scheme with FAT32 boot partition. In my attempts I use MBR partition scheme with boot partition ext4 and root btrfs. I install u-boot manually and this may be the reason for failure. There are just too many choices, from which rather few are working. So I try and guess.

My plan is the following (inspired by https://codeberg.org/txt.file/blog/src/b...-debian.md):
1. Prepare Debian Stretch by mrfixit on SD card and use it as live media.
2. Boot from SD and partition eMMC as MBR with the partitions:
#1 (starts at sector 32768) Ext4 512 MB for /boot (I plan to use btrfs for root and u-boot doesn't support it (?))
#2 4G swap
#3 btrfs, all the rest for / (I use NVMe for data)
3. Download from packages.debian.org the package u-boot-rockchip, unarchive it with dpkg -x, update ./usr/bin/u-boot-install-rockchip to point to local u-boot firmware (by changing /usr to ../), then run ./u-boot-install-rockchip /dev/mmcblk2.
4. Download Debian Installer from https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/arm6...rd-images/ and prepare it as zcat firmware.pinebook-pro-rk3399.img.gz partition.img.gz > netinstall.img. After that write the netinst.img to USB stick.
5. Shutdown Pinebook Pro, eject SD, put USB to USB-3 port (USB-2 is necessary for ethernet, because WiFi is not working during installation (?)) and boot the Pinebook Pro. This image does not always boot. I am not sure if Pinebook Pro loads u-boot from eMMC or from USB stick.
6. Follow installation instructions. Do not repartition the eMMC, do not reformat the partitions, just put mount points. Do not install any bootloader.
7. Just before exiting the installer, enter the command line and execute the following (just copy / paste from document):
mount --rbind /dev /target/dev
mount --rbind /proc /target/proc
mount --rbind /sys /target/sys
chroot /target
wget -O /etc/kernel/postinst.d/zz-sync-dtb https://salsa.debian.org/debian/u-boot-m...z-sync-dtb
chmod u+x,g+x,o+x /etc/kernel/postinst.d/zz-sync-dtb
/etc/kernel/postinst.d/zz-sync-dtb $(uname -r)
apt --install-recommends --install-suggests install u-boot-menu
u-boot-update # this copies ftd to /boot and creates /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf

After that finish the installation, shutdown the Pinebook Pro and eject USB stick. When starting, Pinebook Pro either does not start or does not have DP output. I have not detected the pattern, because with each new try I do something differently. No success until now.

[rempfer]

I now have a working almost clean Bullseye release installed on my Pinebook Pro.

My starting point was daniel-thompson/pinebook-pro-debian-installer on the eMMC so my system would not boot from SD, I tried a few moves to work around this but failed leaving a borked system. Solution was to remove the eMMC and use a USB to eMMC adapter on another computer (I have the one from the Pinestore), to flash the SD install according to the README located in http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/bulls...rd-images/

After reinstalling the eMMC in the PBP it will boot from eMMC and the installation can be completed from the built-in screen and keyboard. An USB-ethernet dongle is needed as WiFi doesn't work in the install.

Extra care needs to be taken at the partitioning stage as the Guided (without LVM) will overwrite the u-boot and result in a system that will not boot so the Manual option needs to be used. I resized the installer partition (16GB, ext4, use as /). Created a logical partition for swap (5GB), and a logical for /home (ext4, rest of disk). This leaves a blank space before the / partition where u-boot lives, / starts at block 32768.

After install completes it boots in to the newly installed system.

This method does not require a serial console but it is nice to have as it takes several seconds before the screen or powerled comes on.

Wifi
I git cloned https://gitlab.manjaro.org/tsys/pinebook-firmware and copied the contents of the brcm folder to /var/lib/brcm/

Sound
It was possible to get sound working by fiddling with alsamixer but it sounded awful, getting asound.state from https://gitlab.manjaro.org/manjaro-arm/p...ound.state as outlined in https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php?title=...ting_Guide gave very good results.

The system works but I have had a few kernel ops:es that result in the network being lost.

I would like to try installing "Sound" paragraph you mention, but I am not Linux-sophisticated enough to understand how to implement the https://gitlab.manjaro.org/manjaro-arm/p...ree/master "code."
Could you help me by providing step-by-step instructions?  I'm running Armbian 5.10.43-rockchip64 on my PINE64 14" PinebookPro Laptop.
My sound through the speakers is very weak and of poor quality.

Alsamixer shows two columns for <Headphon>, both of which have volume adjustment columns, and one column for <Speaker>, which has no column for volume display & adjustment.  I would paste a screenshot but can't figure out how to get Armbian to make one for me.

Thanks in advance.

[Humid Stylus]

Sound
It was possible to get sound working by fiddling with alsamixer but it sounded awful, getting asound.state from https://gitlab.manjaro.org/manjaro-arm/p...ound.state as outlined in https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php?title=...ting_Guide gave very good results.

The system works but I have had a few kernel ops:es that result in the network being lost.

I would like to try installing "Sound" paragraph you mention, but I am not Linux-sophisticated enough to understand how to implement the https://gitlab.manjaro.org/manjaro-arm/p...ree/master "code."
Could you help me by providing step-by-step instructions?  I'm running Armbian 5.10.43-rockchip64 on my PINE64 14" PinebookPro Laptop.
My sound through the speakers is very weak and of poor quality.

Alsamixer shows two columns for <Headphon>, both of which have volume adjustment columns, and one column for <Speaker>, which has no column for volume display & adjustment.  I would paste a screenshot but can't figure out how to get Armbian to make one for me.

Thanks in advance.

This might already be included in Armbian as they seem to be tweaking many things.

What I did was to download the asound.state file from https://gitlab.manjaro.org/manjaro-arm/p...ree/master and save it to /var/lib/alsa/asound.state and then reboot. Depending on what you run for desktop environment and such this might be a bit tricky as some things seem to autosave Alsa state to this file, so your "new" file with good values might be overwritten with bad values as you reboot. I don't know an easy way to describe how to avoid this (if it happens) so you might be lucky if you try a few times.