Re: RPI4 usb, external ssd

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

mlelstv%serpens.de@localhost (Michael van Elst) writes:

> dwctwo0 is the USB2 controller in the SoC which is only connected to
> the USB-C "power" connector. You should also see xhci, which is the
> extra USB3 controller chip that is connected via a PCI lane.

Thanks, that helps a lot.  It seems that on RPI3, dwctwo0 is the only
controller.

> The xhci controller requires firmware. Early RPI4 boards use an EEPROM
> for that, newer RPI4 (including all 8GB models) need to tell the "GPU"
> to upload the xhci firmware. That is done by UEFI, maybe your UEFI
> code is too old?

I have written arm64.img from the netbsd-10 build.sh release to a uSD
(from RC3, but I see no changes since), and have done nothing further
with the boot process.  I have until now not grasped that doing this is
not an ok approach -- it had seemed like one could boot NetBSD directly
from the eeprom/start4.elf with dtbs, and that was reasonable.

By UEFI code, do you mean that I have to install "UEFI firmware",
specifically "RPI_EFI.fd", the included modified config.txt, and basically the rest
of the stuff in the zip one downloads from
https://github.com/pftf/RPi4/releases/tag/v1.35 ?

Is this just "rsync -av . /boot" after unzipping in a dir, or is it
trickier?

It also seems like if you install this, you have to have a monitor to
de-configure the 3GB ram limit, and to tell it how to boot.

I am guessing one can have it boot from a BSD gpt partition on the uSD.

If so, sounds like we should document that netbsd-10 by itself does not
work on the RPI4 (at least other than some early ones), at least that
xhci is broken and thus the USB ports do not work, that manual
installation of RPI_EFI.fd is required, and that it isn't really
possible to set this up headless (even if it can be used w/o a
monitor/keyboard afterwards).

I also found that the HDMI didn't seem to work when using native
netbsd-10 booting.  I am guessing that this will also get fixed with
UEFI firmware boot.

(I will try to edit the howto a bit based on your comments.)