Netbds10.0 on Rock64 not booting

[Ingen]

Hi!
I have bought a Rock64 for running Netbsd and downloaded pre-built, bootable 10.0 image from https://nycdn.netbsd.org/pub/arm/ for this board.
Then I verify, gunzip and dd the .img file to sd/emmc, insert card and power on. I get a green power light a red st.by and a white pwr light and that's it. Ive done this the exact same on pinebook pro and rpi3b many times with no issues. Just works. I also tried the "daily" but no noticable difference.

I have successfully booted an image from armbian just to verify the hw is working.

Even tried the 9.4 image so now i'm running out of ideas. Btw also tried the dd u-boot to sd but it should not be necessary with these images as far as I know...

Anyone using these images who could help me out here?

[KC9UDX]

Do you get anything on the display?

I don't have a Rock64. But like you I have Pinebooks Pro, Raspberry Pis, and a RockPro64, and they all work.

[Ingen]

Do you get anything on the display?

I don't have a Rock64.  But like you I have Pinebooks Pro, Raspberry Pis, and a RockPro64, and they all work.

No, nothing on the display. It does not respond at all. All I get is a flash on the keyboard-lights some seconds after power on. I guess this image shoud behave like the one for e.g. Pinebook Pro. I follow exact same procedure when i write the image. So I'm really confused here.

[KC9UDX]

I think the Pinebook Pro image works on the RockPro64. I wonder if you could try that, or other images for different devices.

Also I wonder if your SPI ROM has something on it. There are apparently Linuces that will write to that without prompting; and there are certainly U-boots that will boot Linux but not NetBSD.

[Ingen]

Thanks for the suggestions. It sounds reasonable to suspect some boot loader on the SPI for this behaviour. But on the pine64.com it's stated that

Note: ROCK64 SBC no longer includes SPI Flash chip.

I guess I will have to try dig into this but there is not so much documentation on this board and especially not related to NetBSD so I would be grateful for any pointers :-)

[Ingen]

Found some information in the "getting_started" section of wiki. Tried to erase SPI but there does not seem to be any /dev/mtd0. Tried again to write u-boot to emmc. This has to be done from within NetBSD I guess. When I write an image to Pinebook Pro I use /dev/rld1 but the NetBSD wiki for rock64 use the /dev/rld0d (rld1d in my case). If I try that I get: target is busy.

[KC9UDX]

rld1d specifies a partition. You do want to use rld1, which is the whole disk. There is an offset when flashing U-Boot, I don't recall what it is. If you're using an image from armbsd.org, unless it's "generic", it should include U-Boot, which then you can dd the image without an offset.

See this: https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/evbarm/rockchip/

It says to use 9.0. I'm pretty sure you don't have to. But if that's what you do, it works. Just get any version running; then it's easy to upgrade.

[Ingen]

Tried every possible way but I am not able to boot neither NetBSD or Freebsd on this board. Armbian just boots straight away, no issues. I use NetBSD 10.0 on Pinebook Pro and bought the rock64 because of the possibility to install this OS, so this was disappointing. Is there anyone who can confirm they have been able to boot NetBSD on this specific hardware?

[KC9UDX]

Unfortunately I have not heard of anyone trying it on that hardware. It sure works great on the RockPro64, so I would hope it works on the Rock64. I expect the problem is U-Boot. When I first got the Pinebook Pro, in 2020, it was new to NetBSD. So I had to manually copy U-Boot, and change the location of the dtb file. It might be worthwhile to compare the /boot partition on the image you're trying to the one on your Pinebook Pro.

Otherwise the best place to seek other users is the NetBSD port-arm mailing list : https://www.netbsd.org/cgi-bin/subscribe...t=port-arm

[Ingen]

Thank you! I will check out the mailing list and try to experiment some more with u-boot, but as I mentioned earlier there has been some changes to this board according to pine64.com removing the spi. Maybe this is the cause. In that case I'm looking for a rock64 with spi :-)