On the Pine A64/Rock64/RockPro64 you can "set tty fb0" at the boot prompt to enable HDMI output for the OpenBSD installer, to avoid the hassle of installing over serial terminal.
OpenBSD 7.1 on PINE64 RockPro64
11–20 of 28 posts
Re: OpenBSD 7.1 on PINE64 RockPro64
#12Have to say I'm not at all impressed with Pine as a whole. Their stuff is no support, bad documentation, lack of claimed functionality. They make hardware and then tell the community "whoop, you do OUR hard work". And if you don't like because they misrepresented functionality, then they point at the sign "developer hardware"... And it's all dev hardware. And they even sell dead and irrecoverable (without soldering/h…
> Or that the rockpro64 is said to be able to boot with eMMC rather than microSD. But when you try to, it doesn't work. Back to microSD. Weirdly enough Ive heard some users whose boards DO work with eMMC. None of mine did. Again, since docu is terrible, I copied the command that works and didn't for me. Seems like bad hardware versions or something?
I would wager that you're simply running an old and incapable version of u-boot, or that you've somehow "misinstalled". My RockPro64 and my PineBook Pro - which is pretty much the same platform - boot from eMMC just fine. It cannot boot directly from the NVMe port, however.
Re: OpenBSD 7.1 on PINE64 RockPro64
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read this as confirmation that "hardware is hard". Ie most of these premade SBCs have issues of this sort. The exception being the raspberry pi's generally. The alternative is designing and laying out the PCB yourself and with DDR3/4, that's a huge job (my understanding at least I've never done it myself).
It's not the PCB that is hard. It is interfacing with all the interface ICs, each having their own quirks and proprietary drivers, etc. At a certain point, reading data sheets becomes like filling out tax forms, extremely boring work.
That assumes you can even get access to the documentation. Some vendors are very bad about not giving up the necessary documentation to develop drivers, especially if you don't speak Chinese. Or they demand you sign a NDA before you can read the docs, and aren't interested in even talking with you if you aren't about to buy at least 150k chips in your initial order.
Re: OpenBSD 7.1 on PINE64 RockPro64
#14Have to say I'm not at all impressed with Pine as a whole. Their stuff is no support, bad documentation, lack of claimed functionality. They make hardware and then tell the community "whoop, you do OUR hard work". And if you don't like because they misrepresented functionality, then they point at the sign "developer hardware"... And it's all dev hardware. And they even sell dead and irrecoverable (without soldering/h…
As marktangotango mentioned - the deal is roughly the same for all arm boards. Usually there is a lot of tinkering required, and boot process is convoluted and not standartized at all; and it is usually always up to the community to develop/adopt lots of that things. Raspberry Pi feels more "polished" precisely because of that too - the active community means active project. And even then it is not free of hardware-b…
Feels more polished? I absolutely do not understand that, some of the more social media friendly Pi projects involve building cluster file systems with them. Seems very nitty gritty to me.
What's deviating from stock GNU/Linux? Adding a third party repo?
Re: OpenBSD 7.1 on PINE64 RockPro64
#15Have to say I'm not at all impressed with Pine as a whole. Their stuff is no support, bad documentation, lack of claimed functionality. They make hardware and then tell the community "whoop, you do OUR hard work". And if you don't like because they misrepresented functionality, then they point at the sign "developer hardware"... And it's all dev hardware. And they even sell dead and irrecoverable (without soldering/h…
> Or that the rockpro64 is said to be able to boot with eMMC rather than microSD. But when you try to, it doesn't work. Back to microSD. Weirdly enough Ive heard some users whose boards DO work with eMMC. None of mine did. Again, since docu is terrible, I copied the command that works and didn't for me. Seems like bad hardware versions or something? I would wager that you're simply running an old and incapable versio…
Same. I “just” had to use a different u-boot version and eMMC booting works just fine now. The default won’t work for whatever reason.
Re: OpenBSD 7.1 on PINE64 RockPro64
#16Have to say I'm not at all impressed with Pine as a whole. Their stuff is no support, bad documentation, lack of claimed functionality. They make hardware and then tell the community "whoop, you do OUR hard work". And if you don't like because they misrepresented functionality, then they point at the sign "developer hardware"... And it's all dev hardware. And they even sell dead and irrecoverable (without soldering/h…
Drew Devault had a good commentary on it: https://drewdevault.com/2022/01/18/Pine64s-weird-priorities....
Side note: Drew's latest post depresses me.
A sizable portion of software that I use literally on a daily basis was written by Drew.
He has strong opinions, and has spoken overly aggressively in support of them in the past - but pulled a Torvalds, recognized he was doing poorly in that way, and improved.
On top of that, he's on a very short list of developers that I am reasonably confident will only write software that goes out of it's way to be user _respecting_, as opposed to user ambivalent.
E: Fix a typo
Re: OpenBSD 7.1 on PINE64 RockPro64
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
As marktangotango mentioned - the deal is roughly the same for all arm boards. Usually there is a lot of tinkering required, and boot process is convoluted and not standartized at all; and it is usually always up to the community to develop/adopt lots of that things. Raspberry Pi feels more "polished" precisely because of that too - the active community means active project. And even then it is not free of hardware-b…
Feels more polished? I absolutely do not understand that, some of the more social media friendly Pi projects involve building cluster file systems with them. Seems very nitty gritty to me. What's deviating from stock GNU/Linux? Adding a third party repo?
'"stock" GNU/Linux distribution'
GP is saying that deviating from whatever the vendor gives you will cause issues, and saying that most vendors will give you garbage.
Re: OpenBSD 7.1 on PINE64 RockPro64
#18Have to say I'm not at all impressed with Pine as a whole. Their stuff is no support, bad documentation, lack of claimed functionality. They make hardware and then tell the community "whoop, you do OUR hard work". And if you don't like because they misrepresented functionality, then they point at the sign "developer hardware"... And it's all dev hardware. And they even sell dead and irrecoverable (without soldering/h…
> Or that the rockpro64 is said to be able to boot with eMMC rather than microSD. But when you try to, it doesn't work. Back to microSD. Weirdly enough Ive heard some users whose boards DO work with eMMC. None of mine did. Again, since docu is terrible, I copied the command that works and didn't for me. Seems like bad hardware versions or something? I would wager that you're simply running an old and incapable versio…
"It cannot boot directly from the NVMe port, however."
My RockPro64 boots directly from NVMe.
I use Tow-Boot, and my initrd has the modules needed to boot NVMe.
Re: OpenBSD 7.1 on PINE64 RockPro64
#19Have to say I'm not at all impressed with Pine as a whole. Their stuff is no support, bad documentation, lack of claimed functionality. They make hardware and then tell the community "whoop, you do OUR hard work". And if you don't like because they misrepresented functionality, then they point at the sign "developer hardware"... And it's all dev hardware. And they even sell dead and irrecoverable (without soldering/h…
I like it because it's dev hardware. They publish schematics, and their stuff is cheap enough to buy on a whim.
There's an active community to get involved with on hardware hacking.
> And they even sell dead and irrecoverable (without soldering/hacking) on devices like the pinephone keyboard/battery. Or how dare you use the phone usb-c port when on the keyboard - if you do, you fry the charging chip and possibly the battery.
Yes, this was bad.
> Or that the rockpro64 is said to be able to boot with eMMC rather than microSD. But when you try to, it doesn't work. Back to microSD. Weirdly enough Ive heard some users whose boards DO work with eMMC. None of mine did. Again, since docu is terrible, I copied the command that works and didn't for me. Seems like bad hardware versions or something?
eMMC and NVMe booting is supported by the hardware. The firmware might not, but the firmware is writable, and the developer community is working on unifying this.
State of the art for Linux distros is to install Tow-Boot on your SPI flash, and then a UEFI OS.
Re: OpenBSD 7.1 on PINE64 RockPro64
#20Have to say I'm not at all impressed with Pine as a whole. Their stuff is no support, bad documentation, lack of claimed functionality. They make hardware and then tell the community "whoop, you do OUR hard work". And if you don't like because they misrepresented functionality, then they point at the sign "developer hardware"... And it's all dev hardware. And they even sell dead and irrecoverable (without soldering/h…
I'm a previous owner of a few Pine products but I just can't get even a little exited about any of their hardware anymore for most of the reasons you mentioned. Pine supporters will point out that their site claims they don't develop or support software and while that is actually true, their entire software stack is held up by a handful of people doing the work for little gratitude and no pay. It's quite a shame how…
> It's quite a shame how much better their hardware could be if they hired someone to do the in-house work for stable OS support on any of their devices.
Perhaps, but is there any company doing that for aarch64 devices?
The Pine64 development community are making cross-distro improvements to aarch64 support, e.g. Tow-Boot.