Re: NetBSD evbarm - Help with Raspberry Pi 4 installation and build

[Lee de Byl <lee%32kb.net@localhost>]

Thank you for the background on BOT vs UASP; that's not something I was aware of. Nonetheless, I have found disk IO performance to be more than adequate using an inexpensive Toshiba 120GB USB 3.0 external SSD -- certainly orders of magnitude faster than an SD card on a Raspberry PI 3B using an SD card.

Unfortunately I have not made any further progress with getting the arm64.img to successfully boot on the RPi 4 and fear I may have reached the limits of my knowledge around UEFI, boot configuration, kernel parameter, DTBs etc. I had hoped that the Rpi 4 would work "out of the box", given that it is so prolific and NetBSD appeared to work well on the RPi3, which as I understand has a very similar processor architecture.

> On 3 May 2021, at 4:18 pm, Sad Clouds <cryintothebluesky%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:
> 
> From what I remember, NetBSD-9 didn't support RPi4, only
> NetBSD-current. The install process was quite weird - you had to
> download boot firmware and copy that to DOS partition, then there was
> a bug with NetBSD kernel where it wouldn't boot properly, unless you
> selected "serial console" in firmware option, I don't remember the
> details now or if the bug has been fixed. Not tried booting it from
> USB. NetBSD also lacks support for UASP, so if you plan on using SSD
> via USB3, you'll be limited by the BOT protocol
> (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Attached_SCSI)
> 
> Not sure how well latest NetBSD works on RPi4, but at the time I found
> NetBSD not stable/polished enough on RPi4. I've been using OpenSuse
> Linux, it works quite well. The Leap release only boots from micro sd
> card, so I use Tumbleweed instead which can boot from USB. I've been
> running it for a bit and seems to be pretty stable. I use Samsung T7
> SSD drive via USB3 port and it makes a huge difference to how
> responsive the system feels.