Re: Raspberry Pi installation comments

["David H. Gutteridge" <dhgutteridge%sympatico.ca@localhost>]

On Mon, 7 Oct 2013, at 13:31:13 +0200, Moritz Wilhelmy wrote:
>Hello,
>
>I recently succeeded installing NetBSD on my Raspberry Pi using the
>earmhf _inst image from -current.
>
>Here are some comments:
>
>* Nowhere in the documentation is mentioned that you need to add the
>  msdos MBR partition again as BSD partition ld0e with mount point
>  /boot. I mounted it as /rpi initially, figuring /boot might be needed
>  for something else and sysinst couldn't copy /netbsd.bin to
>  /boot/kernel.img, which I then did manually. It would be nice if
>  sysinst would automatically detect the msdos partition as ld0e or at
>  least the error message would clarify it.

Technically, as far as I know, it's not necessary to mount that
partition. It's only there to provide the necessary files to boot
from, so you'd only need to mount it if you want to change something.

>* I installed to a 16G SD card and sysinst complained that it couldn't
>  figure out the correct drive geometry from the values obtained from
>  BIOS. I'm not sure if the message should be changed or if sysinst
>  actually probes BIOS. After setting the right geometry manually (as
>  obtained by fdisk -l from my linux box) and creating some partitions
>  with sysinst, sysinst was able to figure the correct geometry by
>  itself as soon as I rebooted, deleted the partitions and started from
>  scratch.

(Technically, there is no BIOS. That's an x86 thing. I can't comment
on the probing aspect, but I've found issues mounting particular USB
flash drives.)

>* As my Raspberry Pi is currently completely headless, I would like to
>  be able to boot to single user mode and have single user mode
>  automatically start the network and sshd rather than attaching a
>  serial cable. Does anyone know if that's possible?

You don't want to boot it to single user if you're going to do
anything useful with it. You boot it to multi-user and enable sshd in
rc.conf. I can attest running a Pi headless works quite fine, I've
been doing so for a couple of months.

>* Since the Raspberry Pi is a rather slow machine (especially when
>  doing SD I/O), I'd be interested in cross-compiling pkgsrc packages
>  for it from a faster machine. There are some notes on ftp.netbsd.org
>  about cross-compiling pkgsrc packages, but I'm not sure if they are up
>  to date.

I believe the basic notion was to set the compiler used by pkgsrc to
one built for a cross-compile of the NetBSD source itself and then go
from there, but easier said than done, perhaps. I haven't tried it, as
I found (command line) binary packages built for NetBSD 5 available
through NetBSD's FTP site suited my needs.

Regards,

Dave