Official Debian support

[moonwalkers]

Any change you could send me a dpkg -l output some time along with your extlinux.conf?  I have the u-boot from experimental, dtb from experimental, kernel from bullseye (same version as sid), and i'm using this extlinux config:

TIMEOUT 5
DEFAULT debian
LABEL debian
  MENU LABEL Debian bullseye
  LINUX /vmlinuz
  INITRD /initrd.img
  FDT /pinebookpro.dtb
  APPEND root=LABEL=btrfs rootflags=compress=zstd:3,subvol=debian-bullseye rw


Still no output to the screen after boot.

I do not like answering these types of questions in private - other people don't get to benefit.

Your extlinux.conf appears to be hand-rolled rather than generated by (already mentioned by me) u-boot-menu, and it points to /pinebookpro.dtb for the device tree. Unless you did something special to have that file created, your config likely points to a non-existent device tree and very well could result in unbootable system.


Your TIMEOUT is set to 0.5s, in my experience anything less than 1s doesn't boot right for some reason (quirk of u-boot, perhaps?)

You mentioned you have dtb from experimental, but kernel from bullseye/sid? Not sure what exactly do you mean. Device trees are packaged together with the kernel in Debian, so if you install, e.g., linux-image-5.10.0-8-arm64, among other files it will create directory tree /usr/lib/linux-image-5.10.0-8-arm64/ where you will have, among others, folder rockchip, in which you will have rk3399-pinebook-pro.dtb device tree binary. Now unless you have a separate /boot, you generally don't need to do anything with that file - no copying or symlinks necessary, so long as your /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf has the line "fdtdir /usr/lib/linux-image-5.10.0-8-arm64/". If you do have separate /boot, installing flash-kernel package should automate copying the appropriate device tree binary to your /boot.

When you said "I have the u-boot from experimental", do you get early u-boot messages on the screen, before it actually boots the kernel? If you don't, you likely don't have u-boot actually installed - it's a separate step from "apt install", you need to run `sudo u-boot-install-rockchip <eMMC device>` first before your machine will actually use it.

Finally, as a general comment - always start from the most basic, simplest setup, even when you think you know exactly what you're doing, and leave the defaults in place until you got the most basic default setup working well. While probably not the case here, I can give you plenty examples from my own experience when something as simple as adding an explicitly configured compression method broke things. So don't hand-roll anything until you either fully understand the implications of every parameter, or you got your basic defaults working and you're starting to experiment. And when you do, don't change more than one thing at a time.