No HDMI console with plain Debian on UEFI

#1

I like to have my ARM SBC booting UEFI so I can boot regular aarch64 Debian easily, since you can almost use one image for any EBBR board. So I prepared a sdcard for my 4B and it just worked. Well except for one thing: I don’t have a console on HDMI.

I used Armbian to update U-Boot and the console was working fine. I also checked /proc/cmdline and can confirm I have console=tty1 in it.

Any help is appreciated. My tty to USB is broken at the moment and I’m having a heck of a time to fix my board. Doing some network experiment and whenever I lost SSH connection it is faster to reimage the card. I’m considering getting snapper on it as well now.

#2

Switching from Debian mainline kernel to Armbian kernel fixed this issue. Gonna check kconfig and see what’s different.

#3

Why don’t you simply use Armbian? It has better support then Debian and Ubuntu out of the box.
https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_FAQ/
https://docs.armbian.com/Quick_facts/

#4

I’m trying to build a custom image and debootstraping my own minimal rootfs is the most straight forward way to have a base OS. If Armbian can be installed in the same way I’m down to try it out.

Edit: I might sounds like I was going to compile my own kernel but I was just curious why it doesn’t work.

#5

This is exactly what Armbian build framework do + a lot more. A prebuild Armbian is a result of that tool. Armbian is calling out for help on maintaining in case you feel a desire to improve deboostrap process. A job i this area is never done. Within Armbian build framework or in parts that are used.

Absence of board maintenance? Debian is pretty raw & generic, works well on mainstream, elsewhere is pretty random. The same goes for mainline kernel.