Some Armbian experiments

[rpardini]

Hello! I've started work on Armbian using your mainline efforts. It's in very early stages.
My use-case is a Kubernetes cluster on different ARM64 Single Board Computers running Armbian. The idea is to couple each OnePlus phone with an SBC that is itself a cluster node, but also provides USB power and networking via usb0 bridge.
I've started from pmOS and I'm working backwards from that. Right now I've managed to build your tree using Armbian chroot, together with the Armbian-built rootfs, but I'm still using the pmOS initramfs for enabling usb0 on the phone, and cmdline is the same as pmOS default for cheeseburger. So a long way to go yet.
Right now I've tried your v5.10-lts tree and the v5.11 tree, on 5.11 I don't get any console output on the device, do you have any ideas? (I see you're working on simplefb a lot).

"Proof"

PS. I just saw that at least one of your patches landed on torvald's tree, congrats.

[JamiKettunen]

Hey!

This is pretty neat. The simplefb stuff has just been experimentation with the hand-off feature I was planning to add, so we could get really early logs using simplefb and then it would hand-off control to the MSM DRM driver when that and the panel driver is probed (so far I didn't really have that much luck).

With regards to display, this is currently handled by the mentioned MSM DRM driver (CONFIG_DRM_MSM in Kconfig), and likely making that built-in will resolve the panel output issue. Currently it along with many other things are built as modules, so you'd have to modprobe msm to get something happening. If you plan to keep them as modules, you could also add the following to a modprobe.d config file to avoid some extra dmesg stacktrace spam and such (which there already is enough thanks to the rcg2 clock etc.):

# OnePlus 5
softdep msm pre: panel-samsung-s6e3fa5

# OnePlus 5T
softdep msm pre: panel-samsung-s6e3fc1

P.S. I've been working on my own initramfs that can be adapted to work with basically any distro, so stay tuned and check out https://github.com/JamiKettunen/initramfs-tools when I've cleaned things up and pushed everything in the coming days ;)