Peppe

Yes, barebox can do that that way https://www.barebox.org/doc/latest I didn't use initrd, I've just compiled kernel and dtb, appended this latter to the zImage (fully detected during boot time, as it show me).

Thank you @balbes150 I used BareBox for my experiments, I found it very fast because it simply needs two ext4 partitions on the sdcard, in the first I put zImage (with dtb appended in). The second partition the rootfs. It works very good, I wouldn't have to wait to reflash the entire image on the sdcard, I can simply mount this latter and copy/overwrite zImage and rootfs. I write here because I'd want make reproducible your experiment on rk3188, yes you told me "ver 20200922-dev kernel 5.9.0-rc6 for rk3288" but I would like to reproduce the kernel configuration for it, and also the patches involved. Today I've enjoy armbian build system as well, it looks great, no doubts. I saw that configs/boards/tinkerboard.conf would be a good base to made some experiment on my radxa rock rk3188. I found parameters in it like BOOTCONFIG MODULES_LEGACY and DEFAULT_OVERLAYS and I would like to have some documentation about how to configure a brand new board with some customizations. I've the RK3188 Loader file (v2.13) and something that I didn't understand yet how to put in armbian's build pipeline and configuration tree. I just copied tinkerboard.conf to radxa-rock.conf, the loader and also the u-boot binaries. Actually I modified config/sources/families/rockchip.conf and also added config/boards/radxa-rock.conf packages/blobs/rockchip/rk3188_ddr2_300MHz_V2.13.bin if is there some tips I'd appreciate

I understand, by the way that's my linux 5.8.7 configuration: https://github.com/peppelinux/Radxa-Rock-RK3188/blob/master/linux-5.8.7.config here the log stdout, consolle worked very well but still cannot type any char in the login prompt (I'm sure I'm making some mistake about this topic, cant understand what) https://github.com/peppelinux/Radxa-Rock-RK3188/blob/master/batrebox_rk3188_serial.log Here my build instructions: https://github.com/peppelinux/Radxa-Rock-RK3188/blob/master/README.md I also tried rockchip-linux (many branches) but still can't have a working prompt, neither a framebuffer (my rootfs is very minimal, it doesn't have any X server / lightdm starter). I hope to get it working because I have some of these boards and I really would like to renew these with a brand new kernel. Radxa only offers 3.0.6+ with quite old distributions, not so good. Hope to meet somewhere who is interested to go further in this goal. If is there something that you can share, I'll appreciate

I have the same board, same behaviour as @guidoltold us, using linux1-rk3188-5.6.6-lubuntu.img I built a Debian image using https://github.com/radxa/rabian-build. I also compiled kernel 5.7.8 but no luck with boot, have to rebuild/test it again. I'd like to use armbian framework as a base so I'm really interested about how to get linux-rk3188-5.6.6 configuration and build an image on top of armbian. I'm really new to armbian, really interested. I've some radxa rk3188 that I would like to reuse , with a brand new kernel Thank you, this project looks awesome