OpenBSD on Pinebook 1080p?

[rogerroger]

Nah, $5 USB wifi dongle, I've got several of them around.  But the drivers in the install images probably won't handle them either.  Most are Realtek, one is Ralink.

The install kernel has all the drivers as the regular kernel. It is the regular kernel, as far as I know. So if your wifis work in the install kernel they'll work. I bet your dongles will work alright, OpenBSD has done a lot of work of the last decade getting those to work:

Code:

ral(4) Ralink Technology/MediaTek IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n wireless network device
rum(4) Ralink Technology/MediaTek USB IEEE 802.11a/b/g wireless network device
run(4) Ralink Technology/MediaTek USB IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n wireless network device
ural(4) Ralink Technology/MediaTek USB IEEE 802.11b/g wireless network device

(apropos ralink)

Code:

rsu(4) - Realtek RTL8188SU/RTL8192SU USB IEEE 802.11b/g/n wireless network device
rtw(4) - Realtek RTL8180L IEEE 802.11b wireless network device
rtwn(4) - Realtek RTL8188CE/RTL8188EE/RTL8192CE/RTL8723AE PCIe IEEE 802.11b/g/n wireless network device
urtw(4) - Realtek RTL8187L/RTL8187B USB IEEE 802.11b/g wireless network device
urtwn(4) - Realtek RTL8188CU/RTL8188EU/RTL8192CU/RTL8192EU USB IEEE 802.11b/g/n wireless network device

(apropros realtek)

Anyway, you could test easily fairly quickly by downloading amd64/miniroot66.fs, dd'ing it to a thumbdrive, and booting your regular laptop on it. If your USB dongles work there they'll work on the pine.

I don't have a running OpenBSD machine at the moment.

No worries. You can bootstrap from Linux too. When I was figuring it out I downloaded u-boot-aarch64 manually to Linux and unpacked it -- it's just a .tgz -- and got the bootloader out that way.

So you dd miniroot  and then dd the uboot into it with an offset, I was thinking mounting the miniroot rw and copying the files into it.  And when this boots it boots into the installer

Yes, precisely. Just try those two steps to see if it works and to confirm for yourself.   You'll get the blue dmesg lines pretty quick I bet.

So I want to put the bulk of the install files (the tgzs) into a msdos or ext2 partition on the SD which I can get rid of later?  The miniroot and uboot are just to get the real installer running?  Certain files under DOS/Windows have to be the right sector offset on the disk (partition actually), that's why there's format /s and the sys command.  Can the installer deal with USB and an SD card in a reader?  Probably not.

miniroot is the real installer. It's just a standard OpenBSD image with some apps removed ( like, no vi, for example ) but with a installer script added. pinebook/u-boot is the bootloader that adapts miniroot to a pinebook.

But the installer doesn't have the bulk of the content -- the tgzs. On i386 and amd64 there's install66.fs which contains the install script plus the sets; but that doesn't exist for arm64, so you *will* need a second partition to hold them. One option is to repartition your install disk once you've dd'd miniroot66.fs to it to add a second partition for the sets, which makes an elegant contained install disk; but a quicker option is to just use a second thumbdrive; a third option would mayyybe be to growfs(8) the miniroot66.fs filesystem and then loop mount it with vnconfig(8) + mount(8) and copy the install sets into it directly, but that would take some experimenting to get right.

And you should remember to include u-boot, specifically share/u-boot/pinebook/u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin, on that second partition.

If you can wait a couple hours, I'll have a exact instructions for you. But if you can't it's worth taking some time to experiment for yourself. If you just do the two-step dd from Linux you should have something that will at least boot on the pine, even if it's not a complete OpenBSD yet.

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I did (on a Pi)

Code:

dd if=miniroot66.fs of=/dev/sdb bs=1M                                        
dd if=u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin of=/dev/sdb bs=1024 seek=8

And stuck the SD into my PBP.  But when I power it up I see nothing of course.  This isn't a VT-100 terminal that knows how to show ASCII text, it has to be turned into video first.  Maybe the DTD can enable that, I didn't use it.  Maybe a serial console would show what's going on.  It could be sitting there in the install menu, I can't tell.  Hmm.

Hmm. Which u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin is that? Are you sure it's the one from share/u-boot/pinebook in this file: https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/6.6/...019.10.tgz ?

I didn't have to use the DTD or DTB files.

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Wait, you used /dev/sdb? For an sdcard? On linux SD cards usually show up as /dev/mmcblk*. What did fdisk say about /dev/sdb?