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Making RockPro64 a NetBSD Server
The time has come to upgrade my SunBlade 2500s to something more power friendly and faster. I'd already removed one CPU and thus half the ram from two of these systems to reduce their power consumption, but it's still much higher than it could be.
After much searching, I've decided on Pine64's RockPro64 4GiB ram model (technically, only 3.875GiB ram.) Pine64 make SBCs, laptops, phones, and various other mostly ARM gadgets, and the RockPro64 has the fastest CPU they ship (Rockchip RK3399), and can use a small "NAS Case", that is sufficient to house 2 HDDs and, at a stretch, upto 6 SSDs (cooling would become quite an issue at this point.)
In my SATA setup, I have 3 SSDs with a JMicron 585 card in the PCIe slot, two SSDs in the NAS case SSD region, and the third is in the HDD region with an adapter. I have used two SATA power splitters to convert the NAS case's 2 SATA power ports into 4, with the 4th one also powering a Noctua case fan. The cabling is not great with this, with enough SATA power cabling for 6 devices to lay. Probably a bespoke power cable to connect to the RockPro64 would make this nicer and probably improve cooling slightly, but I'm just using off-the-shelf components for now.
In the last year or so I've been working on making NetBSD/arm64 big-endian more featureful. In particular, I've added support for:
- other-endian access disklabels, FFS file-systems in the NetBSD libsa
- the "look 64 sectors later" for RAIDFrame partitions in MI efiboot (the x86 specific efiboot has more extensive support for this that should be ported over)
- other-endian access to RAIDFrame labels in the kernel
- updated the U-Boot package and featureset to include AHCI/SATA support, workaround some bugs and fix the newer U-Boot SPI loader location, and figured out how to default loading from either SATA or NVMe
There are not too many special actions needed for this sort of setup compared to a normal NetBSD or Arm system. While I built my installations by hand, the standard NetBSD Arm images are suitable for this task. It's easiest to start from an SD card with the RockPro64 u-boot installed. There are two U-Boot images available, one for SD/eMMC, and one for SPI (there is an odd problem with the early SPI loader that requires a portion of the image to be different.) The pkgsrc package for sysutils/u-boot-rockpro64 version 2022.01 has these suggested methods for installing the U-Boot image (this package should be buildable on any supported pkgsrc platform).
To install U-Boot into the SD/eMMC card (can run on any system, the image must be written at 32KiB into the device):
# dd if=/usr/pkg/share/u-boot/rockpro64/rksd_loader.img seek=64 of=/dev/rld0c
To install U-Boot into the SPI flash (must be run on the host, and lives at the very start of the device:
# dd if=/usr/pkg/share/u-boot/rockpro64/rkspi_loader.img bs=64k of=/dev/spiflash0
When booting from NVMe or SATA, one must drop to the U-Boot prompt and adjust the "boot_targets" value to put scsi* (SATA) or nvme* ahead of the mmc* and usb* options.
The original value for me:
=> printenv boot_targets boot_targets=mmc1 usb0 mmc0 nvme0 scsi0 pxe dhcp sf0
Which is then adjusted and saved with eg:
=> setenv boot_targets nvme0 scsi0 mmc1 usb0 mmc0 pxe dhcp sf0 => saveenv Saving Environment to SPIFlash... Erasing SPI flash...Writing to SPI flash...done OK
(In this list, mmc1 is the SD slot, mmc0 is the eMMC card, pxe and dhcp are netbooting, and sf0 attempts to load further U-Boot scripts from SPI.)
There are some minor issues with the RockPro64. It has no ability to use ECC memory. It only comes with 1 PCIe 4x slot, and Rockchip errata limited this to PCIe 1.x (though no NetBSD users encounted any issues with PCIe 2.x enabled, and this can be forced back on via a DTS patch.) It is possible to use a PCIe bridge (I have never done this, though I would like to try in the future) to enable more devices for booting, or to enable both a network and storage device.
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Project Report: Add support for chdir(2) support in posix_spawn(3)
Piyush Sachdeva finished the "add chdir support to posix_spawn(3)" project and reports about his work and experience. His code is already in -current and will be part of NetBSD 10.
Originally submitted as a proposal for GSoC, but unfortunately (due to low slot allocations) this project was not part of GSoC.
The NetBSD Foundation decided to nevertheless run the project and funded it.
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wifi project status update
About a year ago the wifi renewal project got restarted. A lot things happened, but the high hopes of a quick breakthrough and fast merge to mainline did not come true.
Here is where we are today, what needs to be done and how things are planned to move on...
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Support for chdir(2) in posix_spawn(3)
Piyush Sachdeva is working on an extension to NetBSD's posix_spawn system call implementation and library support.
He applied as a GSoC student, but unfortunately we only got a single slot from Google this year, so The NetBSD Foundation offered Piyush to work on it by TNF funding outside of the official GSoC.
In this post Piyush introduces himself and the project. He already started with the work...
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Public NetBSD IRC chat channels moved to Libera
Due to the unfortunate situation regarding changes in administration on freenode.net, and the resulting chaos, we have decided to move the public NetBSD IRC channels from freenode to irc.libera.chat.
This includes:
- #NetBSD - general discussion
- #netbsd-code - development discussion
- #pkgsrc - pkgsrc (primarily development) discussion
You can find information on connecting to Libera at https://libera.chat/
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NetBSD 9.2 released
The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 9.2 "Nakatomi Socrates", the second update of the NetBSD 9 release branch.
As well as the usual bug, stability, and security fixes, this release includes: support for exporting ZFS filesystems over NFS, various updates to the bozotic HTTP daemon, improvements to ARM 32-bit and Linux compatibility, fread() performance improvements, support for the TP-Link TL-WN821N V6 wireless adapter, support for the Allwinner H5 cryptographic accelerator, Pinebook Pro display brightness fixes, new defaults for kern.maxfiles, and accessibility improvements for the default window manager configuration.
Release notes and download links for NetBSD 9.2
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aiomixer, X/Open Curses and ncurses, and other news
aiomixer, X/Open Curses and ncurses, and other news
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GSoC Reports: Make system(3), popen(3) and popenve(3) use posix_spawn(3) internally (Final report)
This report was prepared by Nikita Ronja Gillmann as a part of Google Summer of Code 2020
This is my second and final report for the Google Summer of Code project I am working on for NetBSD.
My code can be found at github.com/teknokatze/src in the gsoc2020 branch, at the time of writing some of it is still missing. The test facilities and logs can be found in github.com/teknokatze/gsoc2020. A diff can be found at github which will later be split into several patches before it is sent to QA for merging.
The initial and defined goal of this project was to make system(3) and popen(3) use posix_spawn(3) internally, which had been completed in June. For the second part I was given the task to replace fork+exec calls in our standard shell (sh) in one scenario. Similar to the previous goal we determine through implementation if the initial motivation, to get performance improvements, is correct otherwise we collect metrics for why posix_spawn() in this case should be avoided. This second part meant in practice that I had to add and change code in the kernel, add a new public libc function, and understand shell internals.
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Hitting donation milestone, financial report for 2020
We nearly hit our donation milestone set after the release of 9.0 of $50,000.
These donations have enabled us to fund significant paid work on NetBSD in 2020.
Allen K. Briggs Memorial Scholarship
Allen Briggs was one of the earliest members of the NetBSD community, pursuing his interest in macBSD, and moving to become a NetBSD developer when the two projects merged. Allen was known for his quiet and relaxed manner, and always brought a keen wisdom with him; allied with his acute technical expertise, he was one of the most valued members of the NetBSD community.
He was a revered member of the NetBSD core team, and keenly involved in many aspects of its application; from working on ARM chips to helping architect many projects, Allen was renowned for his expertise. He was a distinguished engineer at Apple, and used his NetBSD expertise there to bring products to market.
Allen lived in Blacksburg Virginia with his wife and twin boys and was active with various community volunteer groups. His family touched the families of many other NetBSD developers and those friendships have endured beyond his passing.
We have received the following from Allen's family and decided to share it with the NetBSD community. If you can, we would ask you to consider contributing to his Memorial Scholarship.
https://www.ncssm.edu/donate/distance-education/allen-k-briggs-88-memorial-scholarship
The Allen K. Briggs Memorial Scholarship is an endowment to provide scholarships in perpetuity for summer programs at the North Carolina School of Science & Math, which Allen considered to be a place that fundamentally shaped him as a person. We would love to invite Allen's friends and colleagues from the BSD community to donate to this cause so that we can provide more scholarships to students with financial need each year. We are approximately halfway to our goal of $50K with aspirations to exceed that target and fund additional scholarships.
Two quick notes on donating: Important! When donating, you must
select "Allen K. Briggs Memorial Scholarship" under designation
for the donation to be routed to the scholarship If you have the
option to use employer matching (i.e., donating to NCSSM through
an employer portal to secure a match from your employer), please
email the NCSSM Foundation's Director of Development, April Horton
(april.horton@ncssm.edu), after donating to let her know you want
your gift and employer match to go to the Allen K. Briggs Memorial
Scholarship Thanks in advance for your help. I'd be happy to answer
any questions you or any others have about this.
NetBSD 9.1 released
NetBSD 9.1, the first maintenance update for the NetBSD 9 branch, has been released
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Google Summer of Code 2020: [Final Report] Enhancing Syzkaller support for NetBSD
This report was written by Ayushu Sharma as part of Google Summer of Code 2020.
This post is a follow up of the first report and second report. Post summarizes the work done during the third and final coding period for the Google Summer of Code (GSoc’20) project - Enhance Syzkaller support for NetBSD
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