Hi,
since the EFF recommend rockchip CPUs and the rk3399 supports AES hardware acceleration (both as opposed to ie raspi, great job radxa!) we bought a rockpi4 to use as a backup server. The debian image provided worked out of the box from both sdcard and emmc (though maybe time for a dist-upgrade), and now i want to set up (1) encrypted root fs with luks, followed by (2) remote unlocking of said fs over ssh. Booting from sdcard i dd:ed the debian image to the emmc, then overwrote the root partition with a luks drive, unlocked and formatted it and copied the system from the sdcard to the new, encrypted root partition. After mounting /boot, /proc, /sys and /dev i chrooted in, added/edited crypttab and fstab entries using the same device names as when mounting and successfully ran ‘update-initramfs -u’.
Time for a first boot attempt! I connect to the serial port via minicom from my laptop and can successfully unlock the encrypted root, but then i’m thrown into the initramfs shell:
Loading, please wait…
Starting version 247.3-6
Begin: Loading essential drivers … done.
Begin: Running /scripts/init-premount … done.
Begin: Mounting root file system … Begin: Running /scripts/local-top … IP-Config: eth0 hardware address 2e:b6:85:62:15:27 mtu 1500 DHCP RARP
Please unlock disk cryptrootfs: IP-Config: no response after 2 secs - giving up
IP-Config: eth0 hardware address 2e:b6:85:62:15:27 mtu 1500 DHCP RARP
IP-Config: no response after 3 secs - giving up
IP-Config: eth0 hardware address 2e:b6:85:62:15:27 mtu 1500 DHCP RARP
IP-Config: no response after 4 secs - giving up
IP-Config: eth0 hardware address 2e:b6:85:62:15:27 mtu 1500 DHCP RARP
IP-Config: no response after 6 secs - giving up
IP-Config: eth0 hardware address 2e:b6:85:62:15:27 mtu 1500 DHCP RARPIP-Config: no response after 9 secs - giving up
IP-Config: eth0 hardware address 2e:b6:85:62:15:27 mtu 1500 DHCP RARP
IP-Config: no response after 16 secs - giving up
IP-Config: eth0 hardware address 2e:b6:85:62:15:27 mtu 1500 DHCP RARP
cryptsetup: cryptrootfs: set up successfully
done.
Begin: Running /scripts/local-premount … done.
Begin: Waiting for root file system … Begin: Running /scripts/local-block … done.
done.
Gave up waiting for root file system device. Common problems:
- Boot args (cat /proc/cmdline)
- Check rootdelay= (did the system wait long enough?)
- Missing modules (cat /proc/modules; ls /dev)
ALERT! UUID=3eff3098-0936-4a20-8e2f-f6048d96509a does not exist. Dropping to a shell!BusyBox v1.30.1 (Debian 1:1.30.1-6+b3) built-in shell (ash)
Enter ‘help’ for a list of built-in commands.(initramfs) IP-Config: no response after 25 secs - giving up
IP-Config: eth0 hardware address 2e:b6:85:62:15:27 mtu 1500 DHCP RARP
Please ignore the IP-Config messages messing up the log, they’re just because i installed but haven’t configured sshd for the next step. Anyway /proc/cmdline confirms the problem:
earlyprintk console=ttyFIQ0,1500000n8 rw init=/sbin/init rootfstype=ext4 rootwait root=UUID=3eff3098-0936-4a20-8e2f-f6048d96509a console=ttyS2,1500000n8
On x86 the kernel command line is in /etc/default/grub.cfg but arm has no grub. I’ve been searching but can’t find where or how to change the kernel command line, anyone? I’m almost there, dammit! 
