I found the reason for the crash: the 6.1.84-vendor-rk35xx doesn't work together with the 2024.10 mainline U-boot.
Earlier the SPI-flash was empty and the Rock3a booted from SD-card, a U-boot version from 2017 (Armbian_24.11.1_Rock-3a_noble_current_6.6.62-kisak.img.xz). I put that image in 'beta' mode so I got the 6.1.84-vendor-rk35xx (+ rock-3a-sata.dtbo). That all still worked.
I then put the 2024.10 mainline U-boot in SPI and wiped the sector range 34-32767 from the SD-card. Then I discovered that the 6.1.84-vendor-rk35xx always crashed, independent of SATA modules etc.
I now disabled the SPI and took sector range 34-32767 from the official Radxa image (rock-3a_debian_bullseye_cli_b25.img.xz) and put that on the SD-card with the Armbian Noble (latest beta channel trunk.201) and rebooted. That does not crash and works same as with 6.12.6-edge-rockchip64 that I used before the reboot to write the sector range 34-32767.
Version is: latest-2023.07.02-3-b1eb2bde-gb1eb2bde (Aug 29 2023 - 10:43:04 +0000)
So I guess I need to look at differences in uboot configs and likely also uboot sources.
The other thing is that If I want to be able to boot from a single SATA device with the Rockchip on-chip SATA, the uboot In the SPI-needs to default to SATA for M.2 E-key connector and not the default PCIe-2x1.
Or wait till I got an extra NVME to put in the M.2 M-key connector and load rock-3a-sata.dtbo after uboot together with kernel. That is preferred I think looking at possible future use-cases.
