FreeBSD on NanoPi R2S

The NanoPi R2S is a nice little ARM board that can serve nicely as a home router or firewall. It is comparable in power to a RaspberrryPi 3 with a 4 cores ARM Cortex-A53 SoC, namely the Rockchip RK3328. It has no video or sound output, only a handful GPIOs compared to a RPi, but it has one great advantage. It has 2 Ethernet ports, one of them is a true Gigabit internal card and the second is also a Gigabit connected through the internal USB3, so it’s a bit slower. On the RPi3, if you want 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports, you need an external card and both ports would run on the USB3, drastically limiting the bandwidth.

They generally come with a heatsink and a fan integrated as the board is quite small compared to a RPi and heats up more easily. People generally use this board with OpenWrt or Ubuntu. In the past, I also used it with Armbian as my home network gateway. People also managed to run it on OpenBSD. But this post focuses on FreeBSD.

ARM64 has been a tier-1 architecture on FreeBSD for more than a year now, which I discussed in this post. I managed to run the RPi 2B+, 3 and 4 easily, but my attempts with the Nanopi R2S proved rather unsuccessful and had their fair share of kernel panics.

Fast forward one year, and we are now at FreeBSD 13.1-p1. So I recently gave it another try, and not only is the whole experience much more stable, the installing process is also much easier and straightforward.

Installation

To install FreeBSD, I used the image provided at PersonalBSD. It’s a custom image based on a patched version of FreeBSD 13. It’s quite customized in fact, and point to its own repo by default. It starts sshd by default, and run both interfaces on DHCP. It has pubkey root login enabled and also has another admin user installed.

The rc.conf has growfs enabled, so the first boot will grow the ROOT UFS partition to the size of your SD card. It’s all GPT. There is a 256MB swap partition, but you can add a file based swap if you want. For instance in /etc/fstab:

md99 none swap sw,file=/.swap,late 0 0

The root partition has the following options enabled:

tunefs: POSIX.1e ACLs: (-a)                                disabled
tunefs: NFSv4 ACLs: (-N)                                   disabled
tunefs: MAC multilabel: (-l)                               disabled
tunefs: soft updates: (-n)                                 disabled
tunefs: soft update journaling: (-j)                       disabled
tunefs: gjournal: (-J)                                     disabled
tunefs: trim: (-t)                                         disabled
tunefs: maximum blocks per file in a cylinder group: (-e)  4096
tunefs: average file size: (-f)                            16384
tunefs: average number of files in a directory: (-s)       64
tunefs: minimum percentage of free space: (-m)             8%
tunefs: space to hold for metadata blocks: (-k)            2768
tunefs: optimization preference: (-o)                      space

It has soft updates disabled, which means that if the board has a hard reboot, you are in for some fsck nightmare. You can enable softupdates offline when the card is connected to your computer (running FreeBSD) for instance:

tunefs -n /dev/da0p2

I highly recommend to enable soft updates to save you much hassle.

Playing around

By default there is no EEPROM for the MAC addresses so they are randomly generated on each boot. Keep this in mind if you want to use IPv6 and SLAAC. There is also three status LEDs on the board. You can control them from the command line with echo 0|1 > /dev/led/nanopi-r2s:*. The custom image comes with a daemon and rc.local shell lines to setup a default state for the LEDs, but you can easily disable it.

The two interfaces are dwc0 for the Rockchip internal card, and ue0 for the card connected through USB3. Here is a quick test with iperf3 using UDP on both interfaces. Results are given in Mbits/sec.

TX RX
dwc0 765 946
ue0 784 370

 

Running it

But does it fit an use for a full fledged Internet gateway? I ran the Nanopi R2S for some time now as a home network gateway, and while it worked very well most of the time, the R2S would from time to time become completely inaccessible. Although it did not seem to panic as scripts where still running behind the scene. I could not identify what the problem was, but I know that the problem happened when either the Ethernet cable on the LAN interface was disconnected, or when too much traffic arrived on the Ethernet port.

AMD Renoir GPU on FreeBSD 13 (bis)

In a previous post, I explained that I backported the 5.5-stable branch of drm-kmod and got it running on FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE although some bugs persisted.

Since then I’ve received several requests if it was possible to access the code or if a port was available. However the answer was always that it was a quick and dirty patch, panic do occur and that it wasn’t published on purpose (but a tarball was available).

But I’ve been at it again. I first tried to backport the 5.7-stable branch to FreeBSD 13. It did compile and display worked. But there were several bugs that I was unable to fix.

So I restarted the patch over 5.5-stable but this time dedicated more than 10 minutes for the task. The thing works and even fixed a bug in the process. Also it does now compile on a fresh FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE ✌️

This new version is available on my github as 5.5-fbsd13release branch. Feel free to clone and try. Intel i915 is still not supported but could be if someone is interested and willing to try it.

Still no port tho, as I’m not confident at all in my understanding of drm-kmod and ability to contribute.

Find oldest file on UNIX/BSD

If you wish to find the oldest file in a directory tree on a UNIX system, you might have found the following solution:

find . -type f -printf '%T+ %p\n' | sort | head -n 1

This is all good and nice, but it only works with the GNU version of findutils. Indeed other versions of find do not support the -printf option. A more compatible option goes something like that (it’s at the same time more generic (doesn’t use -printf) and more BSD specific (stat syntax) but you might adapt it to Linux easily):

find . -type f | xargs stat -f "%m %N" | sort | head -n 1

Today’s movie: Cry Macho

Cry Macho directed by and with Clint Eastwood and adapted from a 1975 screenplay and then novel of the same name by N. Richard Nash. Apparently multiple attempts were made to bring it to the big screen, among which one from Arnold Schwarzenegger. I cannot wrap my head around what it could have been. But this version fared a better casting.

A 7/4 hour long parable about human at their core, and a declaration of faith in the inalienable right for good and honest people to find their way. Simple and truthful from its intent to its methods, neither a western, nor neo-western, but it felt like a (almost stereotypical) country song from the depth of Texas. Yet, beyond its apparent simplicity, it is elegantly put to the screen and pleasant to watch.

HiFiBerry on Debian ARM64

Long are gone the days of the ten thousands songs Winamp playlist, the modern way of listening to music consists solely of spotify blasting its (not-so-randomly) set of tracks and ads on random variants of laptop/phones/speakers.

But I will forever say no to that.
Spotify is bad for the artists, for you, our planet and it has as much a good impact on musical culture as Facebook has on our social life. Today, the common physical storage available locally (if you don’t depend uniquely on the cloud) has more than enough room to host all the music you’d ever want to listen to. Of course this means that you have to handle your music playlist manually. But that effort will refine your tastes as to what is genuinely good music to your ears, and what is just effective product placement.

To handle my music media center, I always had a RPi stucked to my HiFi system. This RPi would only handle playing music (mpd) and remote control (Cantata, MPDroid, ). This music would be stored remotely on my NAS and accessible in read-only from NFS (yup NFS not SAMBA/CIFS).

The music is played through a RPi HAT, the HiFiBerry DAC+ based on Texas Instruments PCM5102A DAC chip. This was done on a common Raspbian (the only viable solution back then), may be you could do the same easily on the new RaspberryPi OS. I did try to replicate the same setup on FreeBSD but neither the HiFiBerry nor the PCM5102 codec were supported. Attempts to play the music through a USB audio device instead of the HiFiBerry HAT were ultimately unsuccessful probably because of the USB DWC2 host driver. The same attempt on a FreeBSD running RPi4 with PCIe XHCI USB host ran the same USB audio devices perfectly well.

[Debian Diversity Logo -- https://gitlab.com/valessiobrito/artwork (GPLv3 -- https://gitlab.com/valessiobrito/artwork)]

But since I only had a single RPi4 that was already in use, and the fact that RPi4 are currently way overpriced and out-of-stock, I resolved to try a Linux based setup on a RPi3B. But you see, Raspbian is rather restricted by the fact that the RPi platforms ranges from ARMv6 to ARMv8 SoC. That’s 32 to 64-bit, so as a compromise Raspbian runs everything in 32-bit even on ARM64 capable SoC like the RPi3 or better (the new Raspberry Pi OS has some ARM64 images although it’s not widely advertised). The challenge was that it should run Debian ARM64 and play audio through the HiFiBerry DAC+.

The main problem is that the Debian ARM64 image runs a mainline/vanilla Linux kernel. Among other things this version of the kernel does not have support for the HiFiBerry. Instead I resolved to compile my own kernel with the appropriate driver included. Also to avoid the hurdle of porting everything HiFiBerry related and other RPi/BCM goodies to the mainline kernel, I used the Raspberry Pi Foundation kernel source tree.

As a starting point, I used the configuration of the RPi3B kernel from the Debian ARM64 image, which you can find in /boot/config-5.10.0-8-arm64. Crosscompiling the kernel for ARM64 was pretty straight forward:

# Mount the RPi image
mount /dev/sdf1 /mnt/rpi/fat32
mount /dev/sdf2 /mnt/rpi/ext4

# Install and clone the kernel
apt-get install crossbuild-essential-arm64
git clone git://github.com/raspberrypi/linux.git

# Setup some variable for cross-compiling.
cd linux
export KERNEL=kernel8
export ARCH=arm64
export CROSS_COMPILE=aarch64-linux-gnu-

# Kernel configuration
# (be sure to select the appropriate platform or the Device Tree Blob won't be compiled)
cp /mnt/rpi/ext4/boot/config-5.10.0-8-arm64 .config
make oldconfig
make menuconfig

# Compile!
make Image modules dtbs -j32

# Install
# (you might have to create the 'overlays' directory in the fat32 partition)
VMLINUZ=vmlinuz-5.10.74+
make INSTALL_MOD_PATH=/mnt/rpi/ext4 modules_install
cp arch/arm64/boot/dts/broadcom/*.dtb  /mnt/rpi/fat32
cp arch/arm64/boot/dts/overlays/*.dtb* /mnt/rpi/fat32/overlays/
cp arch/arm64/boot/Image "/mnt/rpi/fat32/${VMLINUZ}"
cp arch/arm64/boot/Image "/mnt/rpi/ext4/boot/${VMLINUZ}"

# Umount the RPi image and boot it still on the old working kernel.
umount /dev/sdf1
umount /dev/sdf2

# Connect to the RPi and create the initrd.
# This should also adapt the boot config. 
update-initramfs -c -k 5.10.74+

If you want to play with Device Tree overlays for example to use a RPi HAT like the HiFiBerry, you will have to compile the dtoverlay manipulation command from the RPi userland repository. Install libfdt-dev, compile and install libdtovl in helpers/dtoverlay, compile dtoverlay in host_applications/linux/apps/dtoverlay.

You need ConfigFS and the following kernel options for the dtoverlay command to work with dynamic DT:

CONFIG_DTC=y
CONFIG_OF=y
CONFIG_OF_UNITTEST=y
CONFIG_OF_DYNAMIC=y
CONFIG_OF_OVERLAY=y
CONFIG_OF_CONFIGFS=y

Also mount ConfigFS:

mkdir /config
mount -t configfs none /config

The command expects to find the overlays in /boot/overlays but on the Debian ARM64 image they will probably be in /boot/firmware/overlays. I fixed this with a symlink.

Next I had to fiddle a bit with the Device Tree sources. If you want some nice documentation about them, here’s a nice pdf from Freescale that explains a lot.

When I first tried to add the HiFiBerry overlay with dtoverlay hifiberry-dacplus, it could not apply because of “incompatible devices”. This was caused by discrepancies between the ARM and ARM64 DT sources for the RPi. This driver was made for the ARM arch than runs Raspbian, not ARM64. And the ARM arch DTS/DTSI exposes devices differently than ARM64. I added the missing devices on ARM64, recompiled and reinstalled the DTB on the RPi image. After that the DT overlay applied like a charm.

The HiFiBerry DAC+ is now happily playing music on Debian ARM64. The RPi3B runs at ~1.14W on idle and ~1.35W when playing music. I don’t how know much the fat-free low-power kernel config contributes to that, but it seems to run at ~1.25W on Debian’s vanilla kernel and I have some ideas to reduce the consumption even further.

Today’s movie: Calamity, a Childhood of Martha Jane Cannary


Calamity by Rémi Chayé. This is not the first time we heard from Rémi Chayé. In fact we went in full confidence because we already had seen another of his movie, the excellent Long Way North though strangely I didn’t post anything about it yet, but this was a truly amazing movie, no doubt. It’s hard to say where this one falls though. But we both agreed that there was something more, or something less, that made us prefer the former.

AMD Renoir GPU on FreeBSD 13

UPDATE: github branch available (2022-03-12)

You if have a laptop running one of the latest AMD Ryzen 5 (such as the ThinkPad T14 AMD) with integrated Radeon graphic on FreeBSD 13, you probably struggled to get the GPU running and finally gave up to use the generic scfb frame buffer device instead. It is non accelerated, you cannot access any external port nor adjust the brightness, but it’s usable.

Now I’ve some good news for you! After randomly searching the FreeBSD forums I found a post that was referring to a work-in-progress branch of drm-kmod that should support the latest AMD Renoir GPU. This branch is now named 5.5-stable. After some modifications I was able to compile it on FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE-p3 and got it to run on the GENERIC kernel.

Acceleration and the external ports work well. I even managed to get a 3 screen setup working through one of those USB-C docking station.

Only one cable connected to the laptop that carries the power supply, audio, external mouse, two screens, external HDD, floppy drive and more. Now, this is what I call “Universal Serial Bus”.

Patching the drm-kmod 5.5-stable branch to compile on 13.0-RELEASE was pretty straightforward too. A missing function here, a different signature there, some missing constants. A lot easier than other things I’ve been trying to port from 12 to 13.

Since I’ve also been able to install a modern TeX Live environment (the 2015 version from the port tree is getting rather outdated), I can now again use FreeBSD as my main working Operating System. Yahoo!

FreeBSD on RaspberryPi

RaspberryYou may have heard that ARM64 is now a tier-1 platform on FreeBSD 13. This basically means that this platform is now fully supported by the various FreeBSD teams. Seeing ARM supported as a tier 1 is really cool, since we can now play around with those ARM boards (RaspberryPi, BeagleBone, …) that were so far reserved to a selected set of Linux distributions. Being able to use an entirely different OS is refreshing.

In the last few weeks, I’ve devoted some of the very little free time that I have to try just that. I’ve installed FreeBSD on some RPi3 boards in the hope of replacing whatever they were doing before on Raspbian. If you insist you can use the video, but it’s very slow and totally unusable as a Kodi media-center. The reason being (as far as I understand) that the VideoCore drivers are a pain in the ass to port even from RPi Linux flavor to another, let alone on FreeBSD. So I wouldn’t expect improvement on that front for some time.

However as a network appliance or audio-only media-center, it works nicely. It’s just a matter of downloading the appropriate SD card image for your specific board (here and there), dd it to the SD card, boot with HDMI and USB keyboard, then configure your installation from there. Beware though, you should avoid editing the UFS partition of the image until it has been resized by growfs_enable=YES. In my case that triggered some naughty kernel panics (which I had no time to investigate thoroughly, oops).

I’ve also tried some unsupported platform such as the NanoPi R2S with mitigated success. I managed to boot on the serial interface and install some packages. But USB devices are not (or not always) showing, the driver for the second Ethernet interface is missing, and random kernel panics do happen. So I gave up for now and tried an RPi3 board instead.

I also tried running it on a RaspberryPi 1 B+ v1.2. The reason I’m trying that is to replace my media-center setup, especially the audio part. The RPi1 should consume less power, is perfectly capable for the task at hand and I’ve got a lot of them lying around. Since the device will be always on, it should be a perfect replacement for the RPi3 I used so far. For this I had to use the RPi-B image. Contrary to the RPi3 which runs ARMv8 64-bit, RPi1 B+ is still an ARMv6 32-bit architecture and a tier-2 platform on FreeBSD.

One of the problem with the RaspberryPi is that there are a lot of different version nowadays and they all share similar names. For instance if you say RPi B+, is it RPi3 B+ from 2018, RPi1 B+ from 2014, a confusion with the RPi2 B v1.2 from 2016 or the RPi2 B? All these run on different SoC with different flavor of ARM from ARMv6 to ARMv8. You must pay attention to choose the correct image for your board. Use the Wikipedia’s RaspberryPi page to tell them apart, it’s very complete, especially the Specifications and Connectors sections.