(03-10-2021, 03:34 PM)ashleymills Wrote: Sounds good. My shipment has arrived in the UK so it won't be long until I get mine. But I've been playing around with another RK3399 based device.

Building world takes about 8 hours using 4 CPUs and building the kernel takes about 35 minutes. I didn't encounter any issues so keeping the system uptodate with security patches etc isn't going to be a problem. Building 2nd time should be a lotquicker with the -DNO_CLEAN option if there are only a few changes to the src.

(03-12-2021, 02:01 PM)ashleymills Wrote: Other device was a radxa rockpi 4c, similar specs to the rockpro64 but in a raspberry pi form factor and with integrated wifi. It also has an M.2 socket so I have an NVME drive attached which is very fast.

As it happens the rockpro64 arrived in the post today! The NAS enclosure should be close behind. I've already got 13.0-RC1 installed and am updating it to RC2 from source as we speak. Interested to see how hot it will get with the tall heatsink. It's been building world about 3 hours on 4 cpus clocked at 1800 and 1416 and temp is at 62.5 celcius. The rock pi 4c actually got to 73 celcius! building world for 8 hours on 5 cpus

(03-12-2021, 07:10 PM)MNtinkerer Wrote:

(03-12-2021, 02:01 PM)ashleymills Wrote: Other device was a radxa rockpi 4c, similar specs to the rockpro64 but in a raspberry pi form factor and with integrated wifi. It also has an M.2 socket so I have an NVME drive attached which is very fast.

As it happens the rockpro64 arrived in the post today! The NAS enclosure should be close behind. I've already got 13.0-RC1 installed and am updating it to RC2 from source as we speak. Interested to see how hot it will get with the tall heatsink. It's been building world about 3 hours on 4 cpus clocked at 1800 and 1416 and temp is at 62.5 celcius. The rock pi 4c actually got to 73 celcius! building world for 8 hours on 5 cpus

Nice! You should start a new thread with your benchmarks so they are more visible to the community. Those numbers make building on the RockPro64 attractive to novices like myself, who initially would be intimidated by unknown investments in time. Tinkering with the RockPro64 is a seemingly endless rabbit hole, but benchmarks are seductive sirens coaxing out one's inner nerd.

Are you active on the FreeBSD.org forums? I haven't joined yet, but am over there more and more now.

(03-13-2021, 09:57 AM)ashleymills Wrote:

(03-12-2021, 07:10 PM)MNtinkerer Wrote:

(03-12-2021, 02:01 PM)ashleymills Wrote: Other device was a radxa rockpi 4c, similar specs to the rockpro64 but in a raspberry pi form factor and with integrated wifi. It also has an M.2 socket so I have an NVME drive attached which is very fast.

As it happens the rockpro64 arrived in the post today! The NAS enclosure should be close behind. I've already got 13.0-RC1 installed and am updating it to RC2 from source as we speak. Interested to see how hot it will get with the tall heatsink. It's been building world about 3 hours on 4 cpus clocked at 1800 and 1416 and temp is at 62.5 celcius. The rock pi 4c actually got to 73 celcius! building world for 8 hours on 5 cpus

Nice! You should start a new thread with your benchmarks so they are more visible to the community. Those numbers make building on the RockPro64 attractive to novices like myself, who initially would be intimidated by unknown investments in time. Tinkering with the RockPro64 is a seemingly endless rabbit hole, but benchmarks are seductive sirens coaxing out one's inner nerd.

Are you active on the FreeBSD.org forums? I haven't joined yet, but am over there more and more now.

I'll make a better timing of it, including a script to log temperatures during the build when I update to RC3 when they release it in a week or so, and make a new thread as you suggest.

I'm not active on the FreeBSD.org forums as I don't really have time and it seems pretty well resourced.

(03-13-2021, 02:24 AM)diizzy Wrote: I few things I noticed browsing this thread

Unless you have very good reason to use 14-CURRENT (probably not if you're starting out) use the -RELEASE images. 13.0-RC2 (as time of writing) is close to 14-CURRENT and all -CURRENT images have debugging on which eats a lot of performance.
http://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/ISO-IMAGES/13.0/

I would be a bit cautious about portmaster, while se@freebsd.org is working on it you're likely to run into some rough edges. Pre-built packages are picking up for aarch64 on 13 but some might not still be available and are managed by the pkg tool. You can also either use "ports" (do not run either on a SD-card) and build (compile) packages "manually" or generate packages using Poudriere for a local package repo. Please refer to FreeBSD's handbook as it's very comprehensive about packages and well written overall. https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/

Video/Desktop support is still pretty barebone, graphics driver is expected to arrive in late summer or so.

In about 98% of all cases aarch64 works the same as x86 so there's very little that works differently so there's usually no need to search for "arm-specific" documentation.

There are a few irc channels which might be helpful such as #freebsdhelp on EFNet keep in mind though that many live in Europe so it can take a while to get a reply, #bsdmips is more techical which probably isn't the "right" forum for general questions. There are also channels on other networks such as freenode. https://wiki.freebsd.org/IRC/Channels
If you have questions please try looking at the handbook, forums and mailinglists as your answer can probably be found before asking on IRC or mailinglists and please follow http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#beprecise .

@ashleymills
There's currently no support for big.LITTLE in terms of "split" cpu frequency so all cores runs at 1.4GHz (if you're running powerd) or have set it manually using sysctl
If you're compiling you might want to have a look at the settings mentioned on this page https://wiki.freebsd.org/action/show/arm/Build_image_using_release_building_infrastructure for /etc/make.conf and /etc/src.conf to reduce compilation time.
If you have the Raxda board working, please submit a patch to the ports repo for u-boot support.

Worth noting is that the network driver is wip so you might not get linespeed.

(06-24-2021, 06:17 AM)diizzy Wrote: I've been running FreeBSD 13-STABLE on my boards for quite some time and they do run really well in general (using external Intel NIC). I'm fairly sure the NIC driver has improved in 13-STABLE branch compared to 13-RELEASE.