[HN Gopher] OpenBSD 7.1 on PINE64 RockPro64
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OpenBSD 7.1 on PINE64 RockPro64
Author : hucste
Score : 62 points
Date : 2022-06-10 09:57 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bsandro.tech)
(TXT) w3m dump (bsandro.tech)
| noasaservice wrote:
| Have to say I'm not at all impressed with Pine as a whole. Their
| stuff is no support, bad documentation, lack of claimed
| functionality. They make hardware and then tell the community
| "whoop, you do OUR hard work".
|
| And if you don't like because they misrepresented functionality,
| then they point at the sign "developer hardware"... And it's all
| dev hardware.
|
| And they even sell dead and irrecoverable (without
| soldering/hacking) on devices like the pinephone
| keyboard/battery. Or how dare you use the phone usb-c port when
| on the keyboard - if you do, you fry the charging chip and
| possibly the battery.
|
| Or that the rockpro64 is said to be able to boot with eMMC rather
| than microSD. But when you try to, it doesn't work. Back to
| microSD. Weirdly enough Ive heard some users whose boards DO work
| with eMMC. None of mine did. Again, since docu is terrible, I
| copied the command that works and didn't for me. Seems like bad
| hardware versions or something?
|
| These sorts of landmines are everywhere with Pine hardware.
| confident_inept wrote:
| I'm a previous owner of a few Pine products but I just can't
| get even a little exited about any of their hardware anymore
| for most of the reasons you mentioned. Pine supporters will
| point out that their site claims they don't develop or support
| software and while that is actually true, their entire software
| stack is held up by a handful of people doing the work for
| little gratitude and no pay.
|
| It's quite a shame how much better their hardware could be if
| they hired someone to do the in-house work for stable OS
| support on any of their devices.
| peanutbox wrote:
| > It's quite a shame how much better their hardware could be
| if they hired someone to do the in-house work for stable OS
| support on any of their devices.
|
| Perhaps, but is there any company doing that for aarch64
| devices?
|
| The Pine64 development community are making cross-distro
| improvements to aarch64 support, e.g. Tow-Boot.
| kop316 wrote:
| Drew Devault had a good commentary on it:
| https://drewdevault.com/2022/01/18/Pine64s-weird-priorities....
| Shared404 wrote:
| Side note: Drew's latest post depresses me.
|
| A sizable portion of software that I use literally on a daily
| basis was written by Drew.
|
| He has strong opinions, and has spoken overly aggressively in
| support of them in the past - but pulled a Torvalds,
| recognized he was doing poorly in that way, and improved.
|
| On top of that, he's on a very short list of developers that
| I am reasonably confident will only write software that goes
| out of it's way to be user _respecting_, as opposed to user
| ambivalent.
|
| E: Fix a typo
| HeckFeck wrote:
| > And they even sell dead and irrecoverable (without
| soldering/hacking) on devices like the pinephone
| keyboard/battery.
|
| This is such a shame too, because something that gives me a
| decent portable keyboard with Linux linked to mobile Internet,
| and proper Kernel mainline drivers meaning it's less likely to
| be abandoned after a year, was so enticing. But the same
| happened me - my P64 keyboard would connect but the battery
| wouldn't make pin contact with the phone, so charging the
| device was impossible without disassembly.
|
| I understand it is low cost, but these rough edges impede
| enjoyment.
|
| But, as an exception, I can say that the PineTime works
| wonderfully now. The PineBook Pro also is more or less
| functional with any Linux distro that targets it.
| marktangotango wrote:
| I read this as confirmation that "hardware is hard". Ie most of
| these premade SBCs have issues of this sort. The exception
| being the raspberry pi's generally. The alternative is
| designing and laying out the PCB yourself and with DDR3/4,
| that's a huge job (my understanding at least I've never done it
| myself).
| amelius wrote:
| It's not the PCB that is hard. It is interfacing with all the
| interface ICs, each having their own quirks and proprietary
| drivers, etc. At a certain point, reading data sheets becomes
| like filling out tax forms, extremely boring work.
| jandrese wrote:
| That assumes you can even get access to the documentation.
| Some vendors are very bad about not giving up the necessary
| documentation to develop drivers, especially if you don't
| speak Chinese. Or they demand you sign a NDA before you can
| read the docs, and aren't interested in even talking with
| you if you aren't about to buy at least 150k chips in your
| initial order.
| daneel_w wrote:
| _> Or that the rockpro64 is said to be able to boot with eMMC
| rather than microSD. But when you try to, it doesn 't work.
| Back to microSD. Weirdly enough Ive heard some users whose
| boards DO work with eMMC. None of mine did. Again, since docu
| is terrible, I copied the command that works and didn't for me.
| Seems like bad hardware versions or something?_
|
| I would wager that you're simply running an old and incapable
| version of u-boot, or that you've somehow "misinstalled". My
| RockPro64 and my PineBook Pro - which is pretty much the same
| platform - boot from eMMC just fine. It cannot boot directly
| from the NVMe port, however.
| barsonme wrote:
| Same. I "just" had to use a different u-boot version and eMMC
| booting works just fine now. The default won't work for
| whatever reason.
| peanutbox wrote:
| "It cannot boot directly from the NVMe port, however."
|
| My RockPro64 boots directly from NVMe.
|
| I use Tow-Boot, and my initrd has the modules needed to boot
| NVMe.
| peanutbox wrote:
| I like it because it's dev hardware. They publish schematics,
| and their stuff is cheap enough to buy on a whim.
|
| There's an active community to get involved with on hardware
| hacking.
|
| > And they even sell dead and irrecoverable (without
| soldering/hacking) on devices like the pinephone
| keyboard/battery. Or how dare you use the phone usb-c port when
| on the keyboard - if you do, you fry the charging chip and
| possibly the battery.
|
| Yes, this was bad.
|
| > Or that the rockpro64 is said to be able to boot with eMMC
| rather than microSD. But when you try to, it doesn't work. Back
| to microSD. Weirdly enough Ive heard some users whose boards DO
| work with eMMC. None of mine did. Again, since docu is
| terrible, I copied the command that works and didn't for me.
| Seems like bad hardware versions or something?
|
| eMMC and NVMe booting is supported by the hardware. The
| firmware might not, but the firmware is writable, and the
| developer community is working on unifying this.
|
| State of the art for Linux distros is to install Tow-Boot on
| your SPI flash, and then a UEFI OS.
| rjsw wrote:
| I'm happy with all my Pine64 devices, have an original PineBook
| and a Quartz64.
| drosan wrote:
| As marktangotango mentioned - the deal is roughly the same for
| all arm boards. Usually there is a lot of tinkering required,
| and boot process is convoluted and not standartized at all; and
| it is usually always up to the community to develop/adopt lots
| of that things.
|
| Raspberry Pi feels more "polished" precisely because of that
| too - the active community means active project. And even then
| it is not free of hardware-backed errors and failing points.
|
| Charging ICs are finicky things on its own - the risk of frying
| the board/device is always there.
|
| So "landmines" are actually always present - get any random
| board like Radxa and try deviating even a little bit from
| "stock" GNU/Linux distribution and its outdated kernel,
| horrendous patches and binary blobs - and you'll get barely
| working hardware too.
|
| In my experience the best outcome usually comes from developers
| being as open as possible; meticulously documenting and
| publishing everything related to the product, circuits and all.
|
| p.s. Sheer manpower needed to fully QC and maintain at least
| PC-grade quality of circuitry of that level has to be
| comparable with said PC vendors employments, hundreds of people
| if not more. Pine64 and similar vendors operation is small,
| especially in comparison; they don't move product in that
| amounts.
|
| p.p.s. being unable to boot from emmc on rk3399 device is new
| to me to be honest, if you drop by #pine64 irc channel on their
| server me and local folks can most certainly try to help with
| that.
| sassy_quat wrote:
| Feels more polished? I absolutely do not understand that,
| some of the more social media friendly Pi projects involve
| building cluster file systems with them. Seems very nitty
| gritty to me.
|
| What's deviating from stock GNU/Linux? Adding a third party
| repo?
| Shared404 wrote:
| '"stock" GNU/Linux distribution'
|
| GP is saying that deviating from whatever the vendor gives
| you will cause issues, and saying that most vendors will
| give you garbage.
| noasaservice wrote:
| I vouched for this comment. And all your comments are [DEAD]
| aka shadowban. You likely did something to piss off the
| admins. Either protest or create a new account.
|
| The problem that you bring up in a meta- way is that these
| are the consistent responses I get from the open source devs.
| And as much as I appreciate the OS devs doing the hard stuff,
| basic functionality and hardware defect repair should
| ABSOLUTELY be part of Pine.
|
| For example, when the PP keyboard has a bad support for the
| pogo pins, this should have been stopped, recalled, and fixed
| correctly. Instead, nothing. The open source devs said to use
| paper to shim it https://www.reddit.com/r/PinePhoneOfficial/c
| omments/svc38r/v...
|
| I mean, what the hell? Im glad fellow harmed users found a
| way forward, but seriously this is only 1 issue that makes
| Pine a shitshow to deal with.
|
| And "Charging ICs are finicky things on its own - the risk of
| frying the board/device is always there." dismisses the fact
| that if a company wants to sell a product, "NOT CATCHING FIRE
| OR RELEASING SMOKE" is like the baseline here. Worst yet,
| early PP keyboard adoptees weren't even told this was an
| issue. Leaflets were only included later. But still, this is
| a shit situation - you have 2 USB-C ports. There should ne no
| situation where 1 port = hardware destruction. Again, make
| the hardware right or don't fucking do it.
| daneel_w wrote:
| On the Pine A64/Rock64/RockPro64 you can "set tty fb0" at the
| boot prompt to enable HDMI output for the OpenBSD installer, to
| avoid the hassle of installing over serial terminal.
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