openSUSE Tumbleweed image on La Frite

miguelagve

I've manage to get a recent (25/03/2020 snapshot) openSUSE Tumbleweed generic aarch64 image to propertly work on the board. 
The image just as it is would boot just fine from a usb drive, but the screen would load by chunks and network won't work at all, so it's basically unusable.
All I have to do is point the board to a newer dtb file by creating the folder /dtb/libre-computer/aml-s805x-ac within the FAT EFI partition of the drive (the folder doesn't need root privileges). 
Inside the folder, you have to place a file called platform.dtb, that you have to copy from arch/arm64/boot/dts/amlogic/meson-gxl-s805x-libretech-ac.dtb. This folder is not present in the image, so I took the file from a previously compiled kernel (5.6.2 to be precise, but anything 5.4 or newer should work).
Once you include this file on the image, all the problems that I found before are gone and it works quite well.
To compile the kernel, you can follow this post:
https://forum.loverpi.com/discussion/873/mainline-linux-lts-5-4-x-issues-ethernet-mmc-drm#latest

loverpi

The current u-boot flashed into the SPI is 2019.4 which is based on the Linux 4.19 kernel. Between Linux 4.19 and Linux 5.4 long term support versions, the clock tree setup was changed requiring new device trees for kernels > 4.19. We will be releasing new firmware based on the updated clock tree so that it will no longer require the dtb to be overriden manually and should boot the image directly.

miguelagve

Great news! Is the current version of the clock tree expected to work on future versions of the kernel, or is there any plan to make more changes that would require a new dtb?

loverpi

Basically BayLibre got a bunch of documentation from Amlogic and had to rework the system. There are still components that need to be updated like Mali and new SoC subsystems in the future. It is a continually evolving process but newer kernels should be able to use old device trees with the exception of newly added supported components and newer device trees should work on old kernels and just have device tree components that are unsupported.