Official Debian support!

[lrb]

Have tried pineperson's recommendations about files for booting. No boot.

I suspect that's because pineperson left out some important details. I got it working by doing all of the following:

• Create my /boot partition on the same microsd card that contains the installer image. This becomes partition 2 on that card.
  
• Set the bootable flag on partition 2.
  
• Create the boot/dtbs/rockchip directory on partition 2.
  
• Copy boot/dtbs/rockchip/rk3399-rockpro64-v2.dtb from partition 1 (the installer partition) to the same directory on partition 2.
  
• Create the /extlinux directory on partition 2.
  
• Create an extlinux/extlinux.conf file in that directory on parition 2, with this content: (Note the root= line!)
  

Code:

menu title Debian
prompt 0
timeout 50

label l0
menu label Debian
linux /vmlinuz
append root=<your-root-device>
initrd /initrd.img
fdt /dtbs/rockchip/rk3399-rockpro64-v2.dtb

I believe the reason this works is because the installer image already contains the various u-boot components needed for boot, in the correct disk locations preceding the first partition.

Preparing a fresh sd card (or emmc module) with those required components is most likely possible, but would require more work. I hope to figure out how to do this at some point in the future, when I have more time. If I succeed, I'll describe the procedure in my debian setup thread.

That seems to be what happens. I got it working by roughly following your instructions (and those of the installer as to where to put root=). It's important NOT to tell it to install over the whole disk else the FAT32 partition with the funny stuff gets wiped. I even put LVM on mine without problem, though.

Then I also had to copy initrd.img from /boot (on the root partition) into the FAT32 partition. Not changing that meant that the installer ramdisk kept on being called.

Note that the FAT32 partition is very small, and without deleting some of the stuff, one can run out of room to put initrd. That happened to me on first go.