I have spent many weeks getting Opensuse working on Rock64. I bought 5 of them with 4GB RAM and 32GB EMMC. They make great little computers. I thought others might like to know about this so they can work on these machines.
First thing is I "cheated". I grabbed a debian stretch image from ayufan4 and went from there. https://github.com/ayufan-rock64/linux-build/releases/tag/0.5.15 That image has 7 partitions containing the crazy rockchip boot process. I think the first partition is u-boot. Partition 6 is vfat and is where u-boot looks to load the the system from. It finds extlinux/extlinux.conf for boot instructions. It loads a kernel and an initrd and tells the kernel to look for the root file system with a label of linux-root. That is partition 7, which is ext4. I wrote a tumbleweed aarch64 root file system on partition 7 and installed ayufan4's patched 4.4 kernel there. That booted up pretty well (headless) with a serial console and I continued from there with ssh. I then got opensuse's current kernel from https://github.com/openSUSE/kernel I then merged ayufan4's mainline patches from https://github.com/ayufan-rock64/linux-mainline-kernel I was AMAZED that worked since I have very little experience with git or kernel patching. There was one conflict, which was easy to fix. I concatenated ayufan's kernel config with the opensuse config (are you allowed to do that?) and make menuconfig sorted it out. I turned on support for ceph and turned off support for various things like nvidia and Plan 9. After many days of running builds I got a configuration that worked. I did all that on the rock64. I ended up using -j1 with make because the compiler would seg fault otherwise. I built a binary RPM from this to make it easy to keep track of. The kernel and initrd end up in /boot on partition 7. I had to manually copy them to partition 6 and update the extlinux.conf file to point at the new files. You can't use symbolic links in a vfat. This kernel seems to work well. Ceph didn't work because there was a relocation error loading it's module. This is a known bug in gcc. I decided to build ceph into the kernel (instead of a module) and everything works. When I had everything working from a SDHC card I copied it to the EMMC. I also installed u-boot on the SPI flash using this procedure: https://github.com/ayufan-rock64/linux-build/releases/download/0.6.22/u-boot-flash-spi-rock64.img.xz Once you have a image on the emmc you have to install a jumper if you want to boot from a sdhc again. I got long jumpers to make it easy to do this. I now have opensuse running on all 5 rock64's and a ceph cluster on them. I put a usb3 enclosure on each machine with a SSD and a large spinning disk. This isn't very fast but it works. ayufan4 has done great work! He solicits a beer (via paypal) if you like his work. I will have to send him a few. I think he is in southern Italy. Do Italians have pizza with their beer? Bill -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-arm+unsubscr...@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-arm+ow...@opensuse.org
