[Bug]: Luckfox Nova doesn't boot, SPL panics with No serial driver found

[jimi-dg]

What happened?

Expected: the board boots.

Actual: the board reset-loops. Serial console shows repeatedly:

DDR V2.07 6ede97a868 wesley.yao 22/11/29-19:27:02
08
REG2C: 0x00000031, 0x00000031
In
589MHz
DDR3
Col=10 Bank=3 Row=15 Size=512MB
OUT: sdram_init finish.
No serial driver found
resetting ...

I got it working with the help of an LLM, I verified each step on hardware and this is the summary I got from it:

Cause. &uart4 in rk3308-luckfox-nova-u-boot.dtsi is tagged u-boot,dm-pre-reloc. U-Boot removed pre-schema tag support in v2026.01 (6d04828b4520), which dropped the CONFIG_OF_TAG_MIGRATE block in scripts/Makefile.lib that passed those tags to fdtgrep. The node is therefore stripped from the SPL device tree, and stdout-path = "serial4" resolves to nothing.

Extracted from the trixie image (idbloader at sector 64, DTB at offset 111304, 3220 bytes) — 26 nodes, no serial node, no serial4 alias:

aliases {
        mmc0 = "/mmc@ff490000";
        mmc1 = "/mmc@ff480000";
};

chosen {
        stdout-path = "serial4:1500000n8";
};

Fix, in patch/u-boot/v2026.07/board_luckfox-rk3308b-nova/add-board-luckfox-rk3308b-nova.patch:

 &uart4 {
-	u-boot,dm-pre-reloc;
+	bootph-all;

Matches upstream rk3308-evb-u-boot.dtsi and rk3308-rock-pi-s-u-boot.dtsi. With this change the node and alias reappear in the SPL DTB and the board boots to userspace. It is the only board patch under patch/u-boot/v2026.07/ still using legacy u-boot,dm-* tags.

How to reproduce?

Board in maskrom, flashed the Armbian 26.8.1 Minimal (CLI) Debian 13 image from https://armbian.com/boards/luckfox-rk3308b-nova to on-board eMMC using:

upgrade_tool db MiniLoaderAll.bin # extracted from Luckfox_Nova_W_250419.img
upgrade_tool wl 0 Armbian_26.8.1_Luckfox-rk3308b-nova_trixie_current_6.18.44_minimal.img
upgrade_tool rd

Also reproduced with a self-built image from current main.

Branch

main (main development branch)

On which host OS are you running the build script and observing this problem?

Ubuntu 24.04 Noble

Are you building on Windows WSL2?

• Yes, my Ubuntu/Debian/OtherOS is running on WSL2

Relevant log URL

No response

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow this project's Code of Conduct

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