7.1 on Beaglebone Black - Things I Hope are Fixed

["Henry B (Hank) Hotz, CISSP" <hbhotz%oxy.edu@localhost>]

While it gets built, the install kernel with the u-boot header is not included in the distribution. (You can work around that by using the Linux mkimage command in the delivered OS to read the header from the netbsd.ub kernel and adding the same info to the install kernel.)

The SD card interface is not supported. (It works just well enough to say when a card is inserted/removed, but nothing else AFAICT. I have a working (slow) system on a USB stick since I’m not ready to blow the delivered Debian away yet.)

FFS is not supported by the delivered u-boot. Not a surprise, nor NetBSDs fault of course. I'm working around it by putting the kernel on the on-board boot partition so far, and the kernel can read the root BSD filesystem.

The watchdog timer needs to be disabled. (Apparently it wasn’t running to begin with until rev C of the BBB. Can do it by hand in u-boot. Google is your friend.)

The sysinst program does not (cannot?) install the binary or source versions of the package system. Since the URLs contain a lot of %hex characters I didn’t try to debug this.

Finally, I thought I’d try the latest 8.0 prerelease version, but what I seem to have gotten is a prerelease version of 9.0 (8.99.1). The FAQ suggests it ought to be something like “NetBSD-8.0_RCx”, but the “.” is apparently a no-no.


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