NetBSD

[mhj]

Hi all, I tried out NetBSD on a SD card, and it worked surprisingly well, after I followed the instructions in this thread, that is. Anyways, just a word of warning... if you're going to use pkgsrc directly, don't checkout via cvs on the sd card itself. I kept getting SD card host controller errors when I was doing the pull. It was probably way too many writes at one time that caused it.

I don't know how to compile the packages for NetBSD on Linux, although I would love to know how, because that's the only way I know how to get around the issue.

I'm personally going to keep NetBSD on my SD card for now, until we get an official NetBSD 9 release that supports it and has a fair amount of binary packages.

[xmixahlx]

i hammered my samsung evo plus 64GB sdcard with a huge amount of git and compiler writes without issue. fwiw i don't think there is a general issue with the sdcard solution, just some bad or low quality sd cards.

[gillham]

i hammered my samsung evo plus 64GB sdcard with a huge amount of git and compiler writes without issue. fwiw i don't think there is a general issue with the sdcard solution, just some bad or low quality sd cards.

On my Samsung EVO Plus 32GB, I was untarring pkgsrc.tar.gz and in another window did 'du -sh pkgsrc' and locked it up. Of course I had done 'mount -u -o async,noatime /' to speed up the untar, so fsck was super unhappy.

On a side note I tried an Alfa AWUS036NHA (AR9271 based) and trying to scp off the box locked it up. A TP-Link TL-WN722N (RL8188EU) seems to work fine.
I tried a RTL8188SU based but no driver. in /usr/src/sys/dev/usb/files.usb it should be using 'dev/usb/if_rsu.c' but that file doesn't seem to exist in CVS.

If anyone has a small(-ish, just not looking for something that damages my port or has to clip on the LCD) 802.11AC adapter they are using successfully witih NetBSD on the PineBook Pro, I would like to get a newer one, but don't want to gamble too much.

[xmixahlx]

I think the 32GB card is U1 (10MBps). the >=64GB cards are U3 (30MBps).

so potentially add slow to the list of bad or low quality sdcards to avoid.

[mhj]

I tried again with a Sandisk 128 GB card. It worked wonders! The only problem was that as I was untarring pkgsrc, the system suddenly rebooted. I have no idea what caused it, as I was using top to monitor everything and there were no sudden CPU spikes or anything of that nature. I'll have to try untarring the thing again, but yeah, that card made a huge difference.

[Der Geist der Maschine]

On a side note I tried an Alfa AWUS036NHA (AR9271 based) and trying to scp off the box locked it up.  A TP-Link TL-WN722N (RL8188EU) seems to work fine.
I tried a RTL8188SU based but no driver.  in /usr/src/sys/dev/usb/files.usb it should be using 'dev/usb/if_rsu.c' but that file doesn't seem to exist in CVS.

If anyone has a small(-ish, just not looking for something that damages my port or has to clip on the LCD) 802.11AC adapter they are using successfully witih NetBSD on the PineBook Pro, I would like to get a newer one, but don't want to gamble too much.

Built-in wifi is now supported by NetBSD.

[gillham]

Built-in wifi is now supported by NetBSD.

Thanks to this tiny hint, I downloaded "NetBSD-evbarm-aarch64-202001291610Z-pinebook-pro.img.gz" from under -current on http://www.armbsd.org/arm/ and booted it.  It found a 'bwfm0' but didn't have the firmware.  
https://github.com/LibreELEC/brcmfmac_sd...6-sdio.bin
https://github.com/LibreELEC/brcmfmac_sd...ockpi4.txt

Rename the .txt file to 'brcmfmac43456-sdio.txt', and put both files in /libdata/firmware/if_bwfm/ on the NetBSD file-system.  You may need to copy to the boot partition from Linux or another system and boot into NetBSD and then copy the files off if you don't have networking.

I'm assuming newer builds will have the right firmware, so don't just blindly replace files that might be there.  Run "dmesg | grep bwfm" to see what your kernel says about it.  It will have an error about failed to open firmware file if you don't have it.

EDIT: On Twitter Jared told someone to download the 4 files from this link: https://gitlab.manjaro.org/tsys/pinebook...aster/brcm
Looks like the same file (md5) but that is his official location I guess.

[johnwayner]

Thanks to your post about the firmware, I've gotten this working too.   I'm not seeing the checksum errors you mentioned in on the NetBSD  Arm mailing list, but perhaps I just don't know what to look for.

[johnwayner]

Thanks to your post about the firmware, I've gotten this working too.   I'm not seeing the checksum errors you mentioned in on the NetBSD  Arm mailing list, but perhaps I just don't know what to look for.

I spoke too soon.  I'm seeing the checksum errors as well.  Hopefully someone answers on the mailing list.

[Der Geist der Maschine]

My "review"

This image gave me a nice retro feeling!

Step 1: useradd, add to group wheels
Step 2: start twm
Step 3: start ctwm (these wallpapers )
Step 4: start all these nifty programs from /usr/X11R7/bin/ such as xclock, xload, xcal. You know them.
Step 4: find / | grep wpa
Step 5: man wpa_supplicant.conf
Step 6: xedit /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

After an uptime of roughly 30 min, the kernel crashed with a stack trace while I was in step 6.

Jared' NetBSD 9 image does no provide wifi support and so I'm running NetBSD-current. Apparently, it's extremely unstable.