Re: state of Raspberry PI support?

["Raphael Langerhorst" <raphael%prabidhi.net@localhost>]

[this email is by reference not an exact reply to the subject thread as of
Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2017 20:04:19 -0300 (ADT), as I just joined the list and
do not have the previous email per se available, but found it in the
archives through the web interface]

Hello!

I have recently tried current versions (7.1 and 8 (16th Oct 2017)) with
Raspberry pi 2 and 3 boards. I noticed the following:

7.1 did not boot (only pi2 tried as it is not supposed to work on pi3).

8 boots fine on both pi2 and pi3, BUT it appears to me that the SD card
interface of netbsd8 on pi3 is somewhat unreliable.

I had crashes when building pkgsrc 2017Q3 packages (www/firefox in
particular) and upon reboot and filesystem check fsck_ffs is not able to
write to the card, several times. The same SD card that could not fix the
filesystem on pi3 was able to boot on a pi2 and actually run through fsck
fine (manually!) and finish building the firefox package on pi2. Sad to
say that firefox does not open (segmentation fault), and I cannot say if
this is related to the partial/broken build on pi3 before continuing on
pi2. This is out of topic, I know, but is there any firefox version known
to work on raspberrypi2/netbsd8 ?

It appears to me that after some time or condition the interface loses the
ability to read/write from/to the SD card on pi3 and any attempts gives
green output saying read/write timed out or cannot read/write... (also
fsck_ffs says so) I do not have the exact output at had, but might be able
to reproduce it with some difficulties if needed.

So I joined the mailing list to mention the instability of netbsd-8 branch
with raspberry pi3 boards as this issue is NOT mentioned in the wiki.

However, the wiki does mention that in CURRENT there is a new SDHC driver
specifically for pi3... but presumably this will not be in NetBSD 8
release?

Can there be anything done to improve the stability of the SDHC interface
for NetBSD 8 on raspberry pi3 ? Like backporting the new SDHC driver from
CURRENT?

In the current situation it is not recommendable to use NetBSD 8 (release
branch as of 2017-10-16) on RaspberryPi3, so far as I can see from my
experience.

Note that the SD Card is a Samsung 32GB EVO Plus.

Kind Regards,
Raphael