Raspberry Pi Zero W almost useless

[Ramiro Aceves <ea1abz%gmail.com@localhost>]

Hello,

I have upgraded my raspberry pi Zero W board operating system to
NetBSD-10.0_RC3 using sysupgrade for the sets. Previously I manually
upgraded the kernel, firmware and dtbs (a bit tricky). No problem at
all with that, but do you know if there are plans in the future to do
kernel, dtb and firmware easier upgrades without having to vndconfig
the installation image, mounting it and copy manually the files? Just
curious...


I see that WIFI bwfm driver works the same as bad as in 10.0_RC1. I
have read that WIFI drivers are not very stable but I do not know
whether what I am experiencing is normal or not. My system is doing
nearly "nothing", at 30 minutes interval cron runs a wget command to
download a little 2 byte file  from https://ipv4.cloudns.net/ just to
inform the DDNS system of my actual IP address. From time to time I
loose network and I cannot longer have ssh access. In order to
overcome that, I wrote a service that reboots the operating system
when network does not work (better than nothing). The service
registers in a file the uptime just before issuing the reboot command:

netbsd-raspa# cat /root/network_conn_test.log |grep day

 4:01AM  up 3 days, 12:10, 0 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
12:43PM  up 4 days, 23:43, 1 user, load averages: 1.00, 1.00, 0.91
 4:01AM  up 1 day, 15:18, 0 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
11:28AM  up 1 day,  7:27, 1 user, load averages: 0.24, 0.32, 0.16
 2:01AM  up 2 days, 22:33, 0 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.02, 0.00
 3:01AM  up 1 day, 1 hr, 0 users, load averages: 0.03, 0.05, 0.02
 5:01AM  up 2 days, 2 hrs, 0 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
 2:01AM  up 2 days, 20:59, 0 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
 2:01AM  up 1 day, 0 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
 5:01AM  up 4 days,  2:59, 0 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.04
 5:02AM  up 2 days, 0 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
 2:43PM  up 1 day,  9:41, 0 users, load averages: 0.02, 0.05, 0.02
 4:01AM  up 2 days, 10:57, 0 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
 9:25AM  up 1 day,  5:23, 0 users, load averages: 0.08, 0.11, 0.05
 4:01AM  up 3 days, 11:27, 0 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
 2:01AM  up 2 days, 22 hrs, 0 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
 5:01AM  up 2 days, 3 hrs, 0 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
12:01PM  up 1 day,  7:49, 1 user, load averages: 0.10, 0.14, 0.13

System do not last more than 4 days without loosing network. Sometimes
it breaks in a few minutes:

netbsd-raspa# cat /root/network_conn_test.log |grep min
 3:28AM  up 2 mins, 0 users, load averages: 0.38, 0.24, 0.10
 9:30AM  up 5 mins, 1 user, load averages: 0.03, 0.08, 0.04
12:18PM  up 49 mins, 0 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
 4:11AM  up 2 mins, 0 users, load averages: 0.20, 0.16, 0.07
12:04PM  up 3 mins, 1 user, load averages: 0.23, 0.21, 0.09
 1:28PM  up 20 mins, 1 user, load averages: 0.22, 0.40, 0.25
netbsd-raspa#


It is difficult to download big files from the internet. If you try to
download a for example 1 GB file, it is very probable that it breaks
before 1/3 of the file transfer. That can be solved using wget -c
option but it is very annoying.

It is very difficult to find a useful task for this board using
NetBSD. For example I would like to setup a minidlna server to watch
films but I have done that and it breaks after a few minutes. If you
setup a lighttpd WEB server it will be anoying for the user if it
reboots on the middle of WEB surfing...

I do not see anything useful in dmesg. Only the messages that follow
the forced reboot issued by mi service:

...
...

[     1.410723] bwfm0: Found NVRAM file:
brcmfmac43430-sdio.raspberrypi,model-zero-w.txt
[     1.410723] bwfm0: CLM file default:    brcmfmac43430-sdio.clm_blob
[     1.410723] bwfm0: CLM file model-spec:
brcmfmac43430-sdio.raspberrypi,model-zero-w.clm_blob
[     3.132473] bwfm0: CHIPACTIVE
[     3.232559] bwfm0: address b8:27:eb:ed:85:47
[     3.232559] bwfm0: wl0: Oct 23 2017 03:55:53 version 7.45.98.38
(r674442 CY) FWID 01-e58d219f
[    14.405464] wsdisplay0: screen 4 added (default, vt100 emulation)
[  1197.386358] syncing disks... done
[  1197.436478] unmounting file systems...
[  1197.436478] unmounted tmpfs on /var/shm type tmpfs
[  1197.436478] unmounted procfs on /proc type procfs
[  1197.436478] unmounted ptyfs on /dev/pts type ptyfs
[  1197.436478] unmounted /dev/ld0e on /boot type msdos
[     1.000000] Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003,
[     1.000000]     2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013,
[     1.000000]     2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023,
[     1.000000]     2024
[     1.000000]     The NetBSD Foundation, Inc.  All rights reserved.
[     1.000000] Copyright (c) 1982, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1993
[     1.000000]     The Regents of the University of California.  All
rights reserved.

[     1.000000] NetBSD 10.0_RC3 (RPI) #0: Tue Jan 16 08:28:51 UTC 2024
[     1.000000]
mkrepro%mkrepro.NetBSD.org@localhost:/usr/src/sys/arch/evbarm/compile/RPI
[     1.000000] total memory = 448 MB
[     1.000000] avail memory = 429 MB
[     1.000000] timecounter: Timecounters tick every 10.000 msec
[     1.000000] Kernelized RAIDframe activated
[     1.000000] armfdt0 (root)
[     1.000000] simplebus0 at armfdt0: Raspberry Pi Zero W Rev 1.1
[     1.000000] simplebus1 at simplebus0
[     1.000000] simplebus2 at simplebus0
[     1.000000] simplebus3 at simplebus0
[     1.000000] cpus0 at simplebus0
[     1.000000] cpu0 at cpus0: 700 MHz ARM1176JZ-S r0p7 (ARM11J V6ZK core)
[     1.000000] cpu0: DC enabled IC enabled WB enabled LABT
[     1.000000] cpu0: L1 16KB/32B 4-way (128 set) VIPT Instruction cache
[     1.000000] cpu0: L1 16KB/32B 4-way (128 set) write-back-locking-C
VIPT Data cache
[     1.000000] vfp0 at cpu0: VFP11, rounding, exceptions
[     1.000000] fclock0 at simplebus2: 19200000 Hz fixed clock (osc)
[     1.000000] fclock1 at simplebus2: 480000000 Hz fixed clock (otg)
[     1.000000] bcmicu0 at simplebus1
..
..
...

I am trying to use something different from Raspbian, I really like
very much the simplicity and organization of NetBSD operating system,
I have been playing and studying it during the last months and I love
it but I think I cannot use it for something really useful in this
Raspberry Pi Zero W board. Adding an ethernet adaptor even if it works
makes no sense to me, the adaptor will have the cost and the size of
the Zero W itself.

Do you think I have something wrong in my system or the bwfm driver is
in such bad condition? Can I tweak something when loading the driver
to improve the situation? Do you have an estimation of when the
FreeBSD Wifi driver migration will be finished for that driver?

I appreciate very much your work.

Thanks
Ramiro.