Following the exact configuration you’re describing, I’m still unable to get any sort of sign of life out of my Rock 3A.
Instead of using a UART adapter, my attempted method of access is via SSH (which I have done before)
Using the UART adapter that I have on hand, the console boots as normal until it kernel panics just after it loads the kernel.
This behavior seems to just be due to serial adapter incompatibilities as described in this thread.
I’m certain that I’ve accessed Armbian on first-boot over SSH in the past, so my guess is that it’s not getting that far at all. Serial logs do show that it’s successfully getting into U-Boot, though.
I have tried both the minimal and desktop images, as well as many of my own self-compiled images.
Thanks for your help.