An unofficial Debian Installer for Pinebook Pro

[moonwalkers]

Actually, I've done apt and have the 5.5 kernel now.
My question regarding the rk3399-pinebook-pro.dtb and the firmware blobs. How far as I understand, they were copied by the installer from the GitHub .
Now they are updated there, but not in my system.

In Debian's repos I see u-boot-rockchip, should I install it?

K, for the device tree, from the installer source:

Code:

# Note that we have to create a dummy DT file (rk3399-pinebook-pro.dtb)
# since the u-boot integration will not include this in extlinux.conf
# if it does not exist... and we don't have a real one until we have copied
# it from the kernel image.

Then looking at the contents of /boot:

Code:

$ ls -l /boot
total 51431
<...>
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    62204 Apr  5 07:02 rk3399-pinebook-pro.dtb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    62204 Apr  5 07:02 rk3399-pinebook-pro.dtb.bak
<...>

In my case I got a kernel package update this morning. If you search the packages contents for the file you'll come up with linux-image-5.5.0-1-arm64-unsigned but nothing for the linux-image-5.5.0-1-pinebookpro-arm64, that's because danielt's repository doesn't have packages contents data published and you won't see any files at all listed for linux-image-5.5.0-1-pinebookpro-arm64, but if you take the .deb file in /var/cache/apt/archives/ and take a peek at what's inside it you'll see under CONTENTS/usr/lib/linux-image-5.5.0-1-pinebookpro-arm64/rockchip/ a file named rk3399-pinebook-pro.dtb.

As to the firmware:
For the blob in /lib/firmware/rockchip (dptx.bin) - it is already shipped as part of firmware-misc-nonfree:

Code:

# apt-file search rockchip/dptx.bin
firmware-misc-nonfree: /lib/firmware/rockchip/dptx.bin

And if you don't trust it to be the right version you can compare sha1sum of the file in https://gitlab.manjaro.org/tsys/pinebook-firmware/ and in the package, after all the commit in tsys' repo is from Dec 4, whereas the file in the package is from Sep 1. brcmfmac43456 firmware is not yet shipped in Debian:

Code:

# apt-file search brcmfmac43456
# echo $?
1

But the latest commits in the relevant repos are on 4th and 5th of December last year, so if you installed since then you should be perfectly fine. In the future it will probably be eventually included in one of the Debian firmware packages like firmware-brcm-80211 or firmware-misc-nonfree, until then you can keep checking the appropriate Git repositories.

---

As far as I can tell, this package contains a bootloader image, but doesn't automatically install any updates. So it's a way to get a recent build, but you have to copy it to the correct partition manually. No more convenient than downloading it from github., unfortunately. Either way, I would test it on a spare sdcard before updating your main image.

I'm no authority in this question, but as far as I can tell u-boot-rockchip doesn't contain direct support for PBP. It supports rk3399-based Puma and Firefly platforms, but nothing else. Both Puma and Firefly have separate device trees in the kernel package, and while quite similar to PBP (after all they share the same SoC) they do seem to be a bit different, so the boot process may also be sufficiently different. They might boot PBP successfully, but I wouldn't bet my money on it.