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Rock Pi 4 A boot loader?



Hi,

I inherited a Rock Pi 4A v1.4 from a co-worker who ran Armbian on it.
There are two storage devices present: One eMMC 16GiB module an one M.2 NVME 128GiB module, which I haven't used yet.

I wrote the combined image from [0] to the eMMC and powered it on with the USB-TTL cable connected. The installer worked perfectly fine, installing everything to the eMMC module. I made it use mmcblk2p1 as ext4 mounted on /boot and mmcblk2p2 as btrfs on /.

Then the installer mentioned that there is no boot-loader to be installed and I let it reboot the board. As expected, it found no working boot configuration.

I managed to hand-craft the extlinux/extlinux.conf file onto the /boot-partition and now the board successfully booted vanilla Debian/unstable.

Now my questions:
- What is the necessary to support the installation of a boot-loader in the installer? Is it the missing entry in the u-boot db? - Is using extlinux/extlinux.conf the preferred way to boot a Rock Pi 4? I noticed that this is the way the installer starts.

The system is up at the moment but I noticed that it takes several attempts to get it fully booted. Roughly 80% of the time it will hang 7 seconds after the kernel has started. The printk messages are not really helpful as it stops at a different line each time. Is there anyone else running Debian on a Rock Pi4 and has experienced a similar behaviour?

[0] http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/unstable/main/installer-arm64/current/images/netboot/SD-card-images/

Regards,
Michael (fladi)


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