<![CDATA[PINE64 - BSD on RockPro64]]>

<![CDATA[PINE64 - BSD on RockPro64]]> https://forum.pine64.org/ Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:29:01 +0000 MyBB <![CDATA[OpenBSD install on eMMC without serial]]> https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=19176 Wed, 10 Apr 2024 06:35:38 +0000 dcnetfan]]> https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=19176
I just purchased a new RockPro64 + official aluminium case + 128GB eMMC flash + rtc battery holder but the mistake I made is that I did not know in advance to order an usb serial console or an usb adapter for eMMC.

Now the big challange is to install OpenBSD into eMMC flash without these.
I connected the device to my computer(windows 10) USB port using usb A to RockPro64 USB c OTG port and after installing windows driver assistant I can successfully see it successfully detected with AndroidTool_Release_v2.38 in Maskrom mode.

I am thinking that this might help to flash OpenBSD required files and install it to eMMC card without having a physical serial console.

I downloaded already from OpenBSD official link(https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/7.5/...s/aarch64/) the required files:
the bootloader binaries named: u-boot-aarch64 and and dtb binary packages
from u-boot-aarch64-2021.10p10.tgz:
- idbloader.img
- u-boot.itb
- u-boot-rockchip.bin
and from dtb-6.5.tgz
- rk3399-rockpro64-v2.dtb

And of course I downloaded OpenBSD img file.

Your help would be really appreciated if you can provide me some tips on how should I flash these without serial, only using AndroidTool_Release_v2.38 downloaded from https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/ROCKPro64_S...e_Releases , Miscellaneous tools section.]]>
I just purchased a new RockPro64 + official aluminium case + 128GB eMMC flash + rtc battery holder but the mistake I made is that I did not know in advance to order an usb serial console or an usb adapter for eMMC.

Now the big challange is to install OpenBSD into eMMC flash without these.
I connected the device to my computer(windows 10) USB port using usb A to RockPro64 USB c OTG port and after installing windows driver assistant I can successfully see it successfully detected with AndroidTool_Release_v2.38 in Maskrom mode.

I am thinking that this might help to flash OpenBSD required files and install it to eMMC card without having a physical serial console.

I downloaded already from OpenBSD official link(https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/7.5/...s/aarch64/) the required files:
the bootloader binaries named: u-boot-aarch64 and and dtb binary packages
from u-boot-aarch64-2021.10p10.tgz:
- idbloader.img
- u-boot.itb
- u-boot-rockchip.bin
and from dtb-6.5.tgz
- rk3399-rockpro64-v2.dtb

And of course I downloaded OpenBSD img file.

Your help would be really appreciated if you can provide me some tips on how should I flash these without serial, only using AndroidTool_Release_v2.38 downloaded from https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/ROCKPro64_S...e_Releases , Miscellaneous tools section.]]> <![CDATA[DC LED light stays on after DC power removed if serial cable is attached]]> https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=18140 Sat, 15 Apr 2023 20:11:13 +0000 tpaul]]> https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=18140
Are these pins also leaking power as mentioned here for the A64+? I use the EXP pins on my A64+ plus but they are absent on the RockPro64.

I intend to leave a serial connection attached to this board permanently so just want to ensure it's not going to cause damage long-term or if there's any way I can prevent it.]]>
Are these pins also leaking power as mentioned here for the A64+? I use the EXP pins on my A64+ plus but they are absent on the RockPro64.

I intend to leave a serial connection attached to this board permanently so just want to ensure it's not going to cause damage long-term or if there's any way I can prevent it.]]> <![CDATA[Controlling fan speed on FreeBSD?]]> https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=15277 Sun, 07 Nov 2021 09:55:58 +0000 tenox]]> https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=15277
Any ideas about how to control fan speed on FreeBSD?

Thanks
a]]>
Any ideas about how to control fan speed on FreeBSD?

Thanks
a]]> <![CDATA[OpenBSD booting from SATA]]> https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=14288 Sun, 27 Jun 2021 15:14:16 +0000 StickyPine]]> https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=14288
I would like to install OpenBSD (6.9 at the time of writing) on an encrypted RAID1 device.
After struggling for a very long time with a defective PCIe to SATA card, I finally managed to finish the installation process. But I'm not able to boot from SATA.

I've flashed SPI with u-boot and put the dtb (and even u-boot) on 'i' partition of the disk, but didn't manage to have it boot successfully.

Is there a way to make it work ?]]>
I would like to install OpenBSD (6.9 at the time of writing) on an encrypted RAID1 device.
After struggling for a very long time with a defective PCIe to SATA card, I finally managed to finish the installation process. But I'm not able to boot from SATA.

I've flashed SPI with u-boot and put the dtb (and even u-boot) on 'i' partition of the disk, but didn't manage to have it boot successfully.

Is there a way to make it work ?]]> <![CDATA[Stress testing CPU (temperature vs freq)]]> https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=13503 Fri, 26 Mar 2021 15:35:09 +0000 ashleymills]]> https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=13503
This depends on the environment and cooling system. In this case the rockpro64 was enclosed in the official NAS case (with two 3.5" HDD inside) and has the tall heatsink but no other cooling (case fan not operating).

What I want to establish is how much I need to throttle the CPU in order to maintain a reasonable temperature rise.

I was aiming to test the cartesian product of all possible frequencies, but the first few results contain enough information to move to the next experiment.

I varied the big freq and little freq and ran:

Code:
stress -c 6 -t 300

for each combination. Between each stress-test there was a break of 300 seconds. Unfortunately this wasn't enough to get the temperature to drop back to its resting value, so the mean temperature results were useless, but the temperature rise contains interesting information.

Here is the table:

[Image: stress_test.png]

A few things can be gleaned from this information: the big CPU has a much bigger impact on temperature rise than the small CPU (at the high end): reducing the little CPU by 216mhz reduced the temperature rise by 2.5C, a reduction of 0.0116C per mhz. Reducing the big CPU by 192mhz reduced the temperature rise by 7.4C, or 0.0378C per mhz. That's a factor of ~3 so that's pretty useful to know.

Obviously don't read too much into this, I'm not going to go overboard with designing these experiments, I'm just trying to get some rough information at the present time. I don't know what the steady-state temperatures are for these combos with my setup as I only stressed the CPU for 5 minutes.

If you burn all the CPUs with the stress tool on max freq, the temperature just keeps rising and rising with the passive cooling system I have setup. I let it get to about 85C before terminating that idea. If I'm reading the spec sheet for the RK3399 correctly, the maximum temperature the chip can tolerate is 125C but I guess we don't want to let it get to that point.

What I'd like to understand next is how hard can I push the system with passive cooling that results in a steady state temperature that isn't insane. This would be useful for designing a throttling strategy in the absence of ACPI driven throttling. Then I'll look at adding a fan.]]>
This depends on the environment and cooling system. In this case the rockpro64 was enclosed in the official NAS case (with two 3.5" HDD inside) and has the tall heatsink but no other cooling (case fan not operating).

What I want to establish is how much I need to throttle the CPU in order to maintain a reasonable temperature rise.

I was aiming to test the cartesian product of all possible frequencies, but the first few results contain enough information to move to the next experiment.

I varied the big freq and little freq and ran:

Code:
stress -c 6 -t 300

A few things can be gleaned from this information: the big CPU has a much bigger impact on temperature rise than the small CPU (at the high end): reducing the little CPU by 216mhz reduced the temperature rise by 2.5C, a reduction of 0.0116C per mhz. Reducing the big CPU by 192mhz reduced the temperature rise by 7.4C, or 0.0378C per mhz. That's a factor of ~3 so that's pretty useful to know.

Obviously don't read too much into this, I'm not going to go overboard with designing these experiments, I'm just trying to get some rough information at the present time. I don't know what the steady-state temperatures are for these combos with my setup as I only stressed the CPU for 5 minutes.

If you burn all the CPUs with the stress tool on max freq, the temperature just keeps rising and rising with the passive cooling system I have setup. I let it get to about 85C before terminating that idea. If I'm reading the spec sheet for the RK3399 correctly, the maximum temperature the chip can tolerate is 125C but I guess we don't want to let it get to that point.

What I'd like to understand next is how hard can I push the system with passive cooling that results in a steady state temperature that isn't insane. This would be useful for designing a throttling strategy in the absence of ACPI driven throttling. Then I'll look at adding a fan.]]> <![CDATA[Buildworld benchmarks]]> https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=13492 Thu, 25 Mar 2021 15:57:05 +0000 ashleymills]]> https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=13492
Note that I disabled powerd and manually set the CPU frequencies to 1800mhz and 1416mhz. OS is installed on a 32GB emmc.

I used -j4 in every case. Note that when I compiled RC2 I disabled all debug options in the kernel.

I built a couple of things:

Update from RC2 to RC3 with the option -DNO_CLEAN as an example of a typical upgrade time between minor versions.
Clean build of RC3 to give a benchmark for building the whole system

I measured temperature every 10 seconds. I did also save vmstat output every 10 seconds but it wasn't that interesting.

Results:

RC2 -> RC3 buildworld noclean: 1018 seconds (15m, 58s)
RC2 -> RC3 kernel noclean: 421 seconds (7m, 1s)

RC3 buildworld from clean: 22332 seconds (6h, 12m, 12s)
RC3 kernel from clean: 1794 seconds (29m, 54s)

So as you can see, a normal minor upgrade from src is pretty quick (depending how many changes there are between versions), but a complete build is a bit of a task, but still not bad TBH.

Temperatures:

This is the temperature graph for the buildworld from clean:

[Image: build_temps.png]

The GPU isn't doing anything it just gets hot from conduction.

Max temp seen was 72.6C

Isn't the max operating temp of the die 70C? Does the CPU throttle itself at high temp? If so better cooling should improve performance.

Ashley]]>
Note that I disabled powerd and manually set the CPU frequencies to 1800mhz and 1416mhz. OS is installed on a 32GB emmc.

I used -j4 in every case. Note that when I compiled RC2 I disabled all debug options in the kernel.

I built a couple of things:

Update from RC2 to RC3 with the option -DNO_CLEAN as an example of a typical upgrade time between minor versions.
Clean build of RC3 to give a benchmark for building the whole system

The GPU isn't doing anything it just gets hot from conduction.

Max temp seen was 72.6C

Isn't the max operating temp of the die 70C? Does the CPU throttle itself at high temp? If so better cooling should improve performance.

Ashley]]> <![CDATA[BSD host of issues on reboot from fresh install]]> https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=12761 Mon, 11 Jan 2021 08:26:17 +0000 MNtinkerer]]> https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=12761
[*]
mountroot: waitingMounting from ufs:/dev/ufs/rootfs failed with error 19.

My system specs:

RockchModel: Pine64 RockPro64 v2.1
U-Boot TPL 2020.10 (Jan 07 2021 - 05:00:17)
FreeBSD-13.0-CURRENT-arm64-aarch64-ROCKPRO64-20210107-f2b794e1e90-255641.img.xz (Listed on this page:https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/snapsho...AGES/13.0/ )
Image uncompressed and written to eMMC module using dd

The full boot to kernel panic is posted at https://pastebin.com/BkxGCjsJ

Line 364 is where the error is printed.

The install was fresh and booted fine. The image gives you root with "root" as the password, and "generic" as the hostname. I added 2 users, changed the host name, and rebooted. Got this error several times before trying a fresh install on an SD card, then experiencing the same error on reboot. Reflashed both the SD card and eMMC module a couple of times each, did the above setup, then rebooted with the same result. According to another forum for TrueNAS other's were experiencing this and the issue was their BIOS or the newest version of BSD. You can read more about it there:

https://www.truenas.com/community/thread...-19.13620/

I am entirely new to BSD in any version but would like to start with running a headless FreeBSD on my home lab. I will take a step back and try previous versions but any help in diagnosing this, or manually booting, via the prompts would be appreciated. BSD is way over my head but this just seems like an exciting place to start. Thank you for your attention!

#############################################################################################################

UPDATE

#############################################################################################################

I switched images and found the one posted on December 24th, 2020 works even after reboot. (The image I was using was posted on January 7, 2020. I was confused and thought there was only one RockPro64 image. They have the same beginning and similar ends in the long link.

The working image: FreeBSD-13.0-CURRENT-arm64-aarch64-ROCKPRO64-20201224-3cc0c0d66a0-255241.img.xz]]>
[*]
mountroot: waitingMounting from ufs:/dev/ufs/rootfs failed with error 19.

My system specs:

RockchModel: Pine64 RockPro64 v2.1
U-Boot TPL 2020.10 (Jan 07 2021 - 05:00:17)
FreeBSD-13.0-CURRENT-arm64-aarch64-ROCKPRO64-20210107-f2b794e1e90-255641.img.xz (Listed on this page:https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/snapsho...AGES/13.0/ )
Image uncompressed and written to eMMC module using dd

The full boot to kernel panic is posted at https://pastebin.com/BkxGCjsJ

Line 364 is where the error is printed.

The install was fresh and booted fine. The image gives you root with "root" as the password, and "generic" as the hostname. I added 2 users, changed the host name, and rebooted. Got this error several times before trying a fresh install on an SD card, then experiencing the same error on reboot. Reflashed both the SD card and eMMC module a couple of times each, did the above setup, then rebooted with the same result. According to another forum for TrueNAS other's were experiencing this and the issue was their BIOS or the newest version of BSD. You can read more about it there:

https://www.truenas.com/community/thread...-19.13620/

I am entirely new to BSD in any version but would like to start with running a headless FreeBSD on my home lab. I will take a step back and try previous versions but any help in diagnosing this, or manually booting, via the prompts would be appreciated. BSD is way over my head but this just seems like an exciting place to start. Thank you for your attention!

#############################################################################################################

UPDATE

#############################################################################################################

I switched images and found the one posted on December 24th, 2020 works even after reboot. (The image I was using was posted on January 7, 2020. I was confused and thought there was only one RockPro64 image. They have the same beginning and similar ends in the long link.

The working image: FreeBSD-13.0-CURRENT-arm64-aarch64-ROCKPRO64-20201224-3cc0c0d66a0-255241.img.xz]]> <![CDATA[Did anyone succeeded with NetBSD]]> https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=6729 Thu, 01 Nov 2018 04:21:58 +0000 olivier]]> https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=6729
Am I missing something obvious? I am very new with SBC in general.

Thank sin advance,

Olivier]]>
Am I missing something obvious? I am very new with SBC in general.

Thank sin advance,

Olivier]]> <![CDATA[NetBSD for RockPro64]]> https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=6416 Fri, 17 Aug 2018 09:10:47 +0000 Luke]]> https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=6416 available for download.

Enjoy!]]> available for download.

Enjoy!]]> <![CDATA[OpenBSD for RockPro64]]> https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=6392 Mon, 13 Aug 2018 08:51:53 +0000 Luke]]> https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=6392 instructions to install OpenBSD on the RockPro64.
I take no credit for this work - just relaying it on the forum.]]> instructions to install OpenBSD on the RockPro64.
I take no credit for this work - just relaying it on the forum.]]>