Sorry for the late reply, due to a spacious and long lasting Internet breakdown here.
Am 05.09.2022 um 09:24 schrieb Peter Robinson
<pbrobinson(a)gmail.com>:
>> ...
it's nuanced but not necessarily incorrect. Also when trying to find
their source I find this message which is more troubling [2].
That sounds not like plain mainline, indeed.
>> So you get output from U-Boot before you get a grub menu? If so what
>> version string does the Armbian firmware return?
>
> It says: U-Boot 2020.10 - Armbian May 06 2011
>
>
>> I may have found something, but I'm still bisecting some pieces down.
>
> Gives ma hope.
Looking at [4] it seems they at least patch the configs which
indicates they do more. Also from that post the RockPi4 has XTX SPI
flash so it might not be hard for me to create a patch for upstream to
support it but without one of these boards the round trips of remote
low level debug of boot issues with firmware is probably too time
consuming for me to do at the moment.
I found this table:
https://wiki.radxa.com/Rockpi4/hardware/models
So, their new ‚plus‘ model to produced until 2029 will not include a SPI, not even as an
option to solder it yourself. Instead, it includes an eMMC module by default.
So I suppose, SPI is a dead end for RockPi and it is not useful to spend too much effort
into it. Instead, it makes sense to focus on an eMMC boot drive or alternatively boot the
older models from SD and then mount the root file system from NVMe. I will adjust our
server documentation accordingly.