Tom's Electronics Pages

January 23, 2023

Orange Pi R1 Plus LTS (RK3328) - Experiments with NetBSD ROCK64 images (round 2)

We know from the first round:

We need to use 1500000 baud for the serial console
It uses an old (2017.09) u-boot
It looks for the FDT via fdtfile=rockchip/rk3328-rock64.dtb
This is actually in /dtb/rockchip/rk3328-rock64.dtb
The dts is now at src/sys/external/gpl2/dts/dist/arch/arm64/boot/dts/rockchip/rk3328-rock64.dts
The boot tried BOOTP to no good end

I put the SD card back in the board, hit reset, and try it again. Now I get different behavior.

I am seeing this as a pattern for some reason. When I have a "freshly" written SD card, it won't be willing to boot from it the first time I try it. Then if I put the card back in my card reader, examine it via my linux system, then put it back into the ARM board, it works as it should. On this system, the "fresh" card failed to boot NetBSD from the card and went into this BOOTP loop. On other systems with emmc, it would not even run u-boot from the "fresh" card but would run u-boot from the image on emmc instead.

Whatever that may be all about, it still does nothing useful, I see:

canning disk [email protected]...
Found 2 disks
....
....
....
>> NetBSD/evbarm efiboot (arm64), Revision 1.13 (Thu Aug  4 15:30:37 UTC 2022)
Press return to boot now, any other key for boot prompt
booting netbsd - starting in 0 seconds.
5482464+2521184+2680948+1527188 [437266+711504+498085]=0xf96120

And that is it. Nothing more appears.

This screen clearing nonsense would be nice to switch off -- This could be the efi booting "middleman" if there is such a thing. Whatever it is, it is a liability, not an asset.

Plans and ideas

There really should be no reason that a generic arm64 kernel could not run on the r1+ with an appropriate DTB file.

Study the DTS file now that I know where it is.
Build a new u-boot from the 2022.10 sources for arm64 (may as well target the r1+)
Look at the NetBSD patches for U-boot circa 2022.10
A working saveenv would be one goal (onto the SD card)
Study the EFI booting scheme
Study the DTS/FDT scheme
Learn how to make a dtb from a dts
start work on a custom DTS for the R1+

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

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