Official openSUSE: U-Boot, dtb and graphics

[Jojonintendo]

I've successfully installed openSUSE via their TumbleWeed netinstall aarch64 iso, via serial console that is, with the NVMe as / drive. GRUB appears on the PBP's screen, which then shuts down for the whole process. Upon reboot, the LUKS password must be typed blindly because of this. Also, no graphical desktop after booting, although panfrost seems to be loaded correctly. Otherwise the system is up and usable via serial console or SSH.

I've installed dtb-rockchip, but I can't seem to make either U-Boot or GRUB use the rk3399-pinebook-pro.dtb when booting. I guess this is the missing step in order to get graphics to show at all, but I'm not really comfortable yet in the ARM world, and I'm surely missing something.

This is with the following packages:

• Mesa 21.1
  
• Kernel 5.12.3-1-default
  

I have U-Boot 2021.04 flashed on the SPI, I don't know if openSUSE has flashed another version to the NVMe, but I don't think it would be more recent anyway.

Does anyone have some guidance to provide? Something tells me I'm almost there 

[Jojonintendo]

After many days spent investigating, I found a solution I didn't expect: Tow-Boot

In the end it was related to my U-Boot version (upstream at the time of my original post), that somehow wasn't able to give graphics after GRUB. I thought that once I was in GRUB, U-Boot no longer had any effect, I was wrong. Simply flashing Tow-Boot to the SPI made everything work as expected. Of course now other installers I've tried also have working graphics, like Fedora's.

Now my openSUSE lets me log into my GNOME session and works as expected. Just don't forget to install bcm43xx-firmware in order to get bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

For now I have no battery indicator nor sound, but this is something that has to be patched in other distros too, so I need to investigate more. At least now I can do it right from the PBP.