I booted mine Radxa Rock (rk3188) with BareBox, ArchLinux ARM and a mainline kernel. It just took me few hundred hours to figure out all the problems on my way there. And it's one of the most open source friendly ARM SOCs.
I wish luck to everyone buying these things. You'll need it to run any modern distro in a few years.
Very recently I recovered my rock too. I'm about 20 hours in. Any repository or helpful documentation to save part of the 80 remaining hours? pleaaaasee
Use `rk-splitboot` to split FlashData from the original boot loader, other option doesn't work. Build it, it will create barebox-radxa-rock.img. It's .img, not the .bin.
Write an SD card as in the instruction.
4.) Follow these instructions, but use the generic image.
Are you statically compiling in the kernel modules? (Would have expected some .ko's to need copying too, beyond the kernel image and device tree pieces.)
Forgot the most important one - power it by using power cable that came with it and the 5V _2A_ adapter. It will kernel panic at random places if you power it from the USB port.
This sort of thing isn't that weird in small cheap devices. They more or less demand clean power, which is why the Pi4 is heavily recommended to be used with their official charger.
I find it gets unstable with cheaper USB C chargers.
I specifically buy high quality chargers/cables/battery packs for my embedded work since they are so intolerant of bad power
I wish luck to everyone buying these things. You'll need it to run any modern distro in a few years.