Hello Andreas, Thanks for the informations.
That is likely not correct. It only works with the vendor U-Boot so far. It is possible to boot into U-Boot with mainline-based patches of mine, but not yet from U-Boot into openSUSE for lack of drivers.
I'm trying with vendor U-Boot, as I currently don't know how to force MaskRom on my board.
Short answer is: Use the JeOS-rootfs for any new boards. Yes, it does not contain an initrd, because it's not for a specific board. Theoretically you could use dracut to create a "no-host" initrd, but then you might run into size limitations for the initrd flash partition.
The easiest way for new board enablements is to (cross-)compile an upstream defconfig kernel yourself locally (make CROSS_COMPILE=aarch64-suse-linux- CC=aarch64-suse-linux-gcc-6 ARCH=arm64 ...), boot it and then update/reinstall kernel-default. On the GeekBox I have not yet tried that step, since I would rather have the kernel+initrd loaded from SSD than flashing it to eMMC.
I tried to boot the kernel provided with JeOS without initrd (converted in ramfs) but I cannot load the kernel :-( I know that the full boot is not possible, due to lack of initrd, but I would have try this just to see if the kernel can start. I have error about missing partition, I need to investigate this further: ... try to start ramfs ERROR: [rk_load_image_from_storage]: bootrk: failed to read ramdisk Unable to boot:ramfs ... So, I will try to cross-compile the kernel.
Chances are there's no .dts for your device yet, which means you'll need to hack on the kernel yourself anyway, which is quickest with a non-OBS kernel setup and may require you to use linux-next.git.
I use the dtb file from the original firmware. But yes it may not be adapted to the 4.7 kernel (by default it's a 3.10). I think the dts from GeekBox can boot, as I'm able to boot Android or Lubuntu GeekBox version without majour issue (LED and IR doesn't work). Regards, Loic