Gentoo Linux test image

[jkmooney]

Hold the phone....

just found out that Longsleep's Ubuntu release doesn't come with a desktop......that would certainly explain why startx didn't work (DOH!). I'm installing MATE now and we'll see how it goes.

[kevinava]

Thank you for putting effort into making a Pine64 Gentoo image, it works like a charm :
The Pine64 image link needs an update as it has changed, for those looking it's now found under:

Gentoo Pine64 image: http://itsdave.co.uk/pine64/Gentoo/gento...804.img.gz

Cheers,
Kevin

[xalius]

Thanks for the hint, I fixed the download link.

Sadly Gentoo still does not support official ARM64 stage3 tarballs. They seem to build armhf though...

[shaggy013]

http://ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de/gentoo...ge3-arm64/

gentoo has a lot of mirrors

and yes big packets can be a pain but you could also look at the swap or that your portage temp directory is not tmpfs in fstab

and built a stage 4

And distcc is your friend compiling on 16 cores en the fastest medium on your board sd/mmc/usb/sata makes it a lot faster.

[xalius]

\o/ Thanks for pointing this out, maybe it's time to make a new image :-)

[ivantheviking]

Hey everyone,

I'm new to these forums, but had stumbled upon the Gentoo image a long while back.

I've been a long time Gentoo user, since 2003, and had gotten a pine64.

The test image was a godsend that let me use my favorite distro AND have GNU/Linux on it!

In any case, I had made a gentoo forum post a while ago about this, and a few people have picked up the image there too as well.
I am currently hosting a torrent of it, linked in the forum post there as well.
The real kicker - webhost and the torrent server are the Pine64 in my basement

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-8037200.html

I actually have an up to date build Stage 3 in my ZFS mount that worked flawlessly using the current bootloader and kernel that was on the original image.
I haven't been successful yet to get the mainline kernel to boot the Pine64 without issues, that is my final goal; Pine64 built kernel 4.10 without any blobs.

Thanks for the original work of putting Gentoo on the Pine64, it has been a blast to have a low power server at my disposal again.

[xalius]

I should really get around to make a new image... and whoever uses the test image should see that the latest kernel is used from longsleep's release repo at https://github.com/longsleep/linux-pine64/releases especially since the GbE fix happened after I made the image... also the people from linux-sunxi are making good progress on the A64 mainlining effort and at least for headless mainline kernels should be usable by now...

Re kernel building, you can not boot a mainline kernel with the BSP u-boot... only works for BSP kernels! If you want to boot mainline you have to use upstream ATF, u-boot and spl ...

[ivantheviking]

You've hit on something.
The mainline kernel has plenty of support in it for the Pine64 and A64's chips.
That last point is precisely why I never finished a new image.  Non BSP Kernel means mainline U-Boot.

U-Boot isn't exactly user friendly to setup on the Pine64.
That's the last step I had to do, it was to prep a new microSD card with the proper images on it.  Configuring U-Boot and making those boot images was the last step, and I stopped there.
Being a side hobby at best in a busy life, I ran out of time for this project and put it on pause.  I was only able to get that far.

In a month or two, I plan on carving out a few hours for this again for an update again to try again!

Cheers

-Shawn

[xalius]

Yes maybe in 1-2 month Gentoo's arm64 support is out of unstable and officially suports ARMv8...

[incoherent]

I've put together an image starting from your image doing a couple of upgrade rounds, I intend on keeping this supported and maintained and updated.
Maybe not nightly, but close.

Thanks to xailus for the awesome image =]