FreeBSD 13-CURRENT on Rock Pi4

I will share 4c dts patch to @SleepWalker then he can look into it when he gets time.

where can i find dts file for Rock-Pi-4c?

Hello,

This is the patch to fix usb for rockpi4c while the rest of the dts stays the same.

So we basically have 3 dtb for each model released

  • rk3399-rock-pi-4a.dtb
  • rk3399-rock-pi-4b.dtb
  • rk3399-rock-pi-4c.dtb
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Hello Radxa community!

New Years, a new FreeBSD XFCE DESKTOP installation image is available
for download on the new site. https://personalbsd.org

HDMI audio works now !!!

You can get your FreeBSD XFCE DESKTOP audio experience on Rock Pi4 A/B

All six cores are working now.

Good luck everyone.

PS:
I will be pleased if you leave comments about your experience and my images on this forum,
or on my website https://personalbsd.org/#respond

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The latest u-boot in ports actually has board support for the 4c. I was able to create a bootable image just by changing the BOARD_CONFIG to rock-pi-4c-rk3399_defconfig

They wonā€™t work because the wrong dtb is being loaded. If you want to get this to work, you can do the following (on a freebsd machine)

  1. On your FreeBSD machine (or in a VM) goto /usr/ports/sysutils/u-boot-rock-pi-4
  2. Edit the Makefile and change BOARD_CONFIG to rock-pi-4c-rk3399_defconfig
  3. Build that port
  4. Download the official rockpro64 image for freebsd and unxz it
  5. Write the image to your emmc/SD card
  6. Then write the uboot with the port you built:

dd if=/usr/local/share/u-boot/u-boot-rock-pi-4/idbloader.img of=/path/to/sdcarddevice seek=64 bs=512 conv=sync
dd if=/usr/local/share/u-boot/u-boot-rock-pi-4/u-boot.itb of=/path/to/sdcarddevice seek=16384 bs=512 conv=sync

Then that emmc will boot into freebsd with USB etc enabled

Iā€™ve tried this myself with a snapshot image and everything (except NVME) works

Does NVME work on your boards?

Check out this image.

FreeBSD-aarch64-13.0-RELEASE-Rock-Pi-4c-20210420.img.xz

I donā€™t have Rock-Pi-4c so I canā€™t guarantee, but NVMe should work.

Thanks, yours is the original image I tried first off. It might just be my nvme card, but I notice this line in the dmesg of this thread, as well as the dmesg of my machine:

Is that the issue, what is that line? Does it pertain to this:

https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2019-10-2019-12/#RockChip-Support

ā€œKnown working devices are NVMe devices and PCIe cards that doesnā€™t utilize PCIe switching or bridge functionality.ā€

Is this something they can add or a hw limitation?

Have you tried using an NVME card on your 4a/4b?

I think I understand my mistake here. In my excitement to get going I accidentally ordered an M.2 SATA device instead of an M.2 NVMeā€¦ what a fool

Just tested it with a WDS500G2X0C and it works as expected. I have a bad habit of doing this, rushing to order things when Iā€™m excited. haha, never mind Iā€™ll use the other disk in another machine that has a slow sata.

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Hi ,
I am eagerly awaiting my Rock Pi 4 E so this is a great help.
Have you pushed this up to FreeBSD?
If you agree, I can do this over the weekend. Of course I will give you full credit.
Philip

Hi Philip.
Bring this over to FreeBSD if you have some free time.
thanks

cool
if you want to appear on the commit, can you email me your name and email address so I can give you credit when I submit it.

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Hi Philip!

I am registered at https://reviews.freebsd.org/p/s199p.wa1k9r_gmail.com/
I would be glad if we can prepare good reviews together.
Iā€™m bored doing it alone :wink:

New images!

FreeBSD-aarch64-13.0-RELEASE-Rock-Pi-4-20210420.img.xz

FreeBSD-aarch64-13.0-RELEASE-Rock-Pi-4c-20210420.img.xz

These images have U-boot, for SPI.
And you will be able to configure OS launch from NVMe directly.

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Thatā€™s a Little Bonus - OPNsense 21.1 for RADXA SBCs!

ROCK-PI-E
OPNsense-21.1-OpenSSL-aarch64-ROCK-PI-E-20210417.img.xz

ROCK-PI-4C
OPNsense-21.1-OpenSSL-aarch64-ROCK-PI-4c-20210417.img.xz

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How did you manage/what did you change from the default RockPro64 image so that your image is able to boot onto 4k monitors??

There is a current known issue on the default FreeBSD image for the RockPro64 that 4k monitors will make the boot halt due to framebuffer size.

I have a RockPro64 and a Rock Pi 4a, both of which Iā€™ve been able to load/boot on 1080p monitors. But both hang at the boot sequence when they reach:

ā€œmasks 0x00ff0000, 0x0000ff00, 0x000000ff, 0xff000000ā€

But when I flash my Rock Pi 4a with your image, it works! :slight_smile:

Iā€™m just trying to learn more about all this stuff, so any insight/guidance would be much appreciated. Plus, seems like whatever you did would be a commit worthy fix to a known bug.

Knowing about the 4K buffer size issue in FreeBSD.
I just tried to avoid these problems.
This is achieved by forcing the 1080p mode even if your monitor is 4K.
This mode is set to u-boot and FreeBSD sees 1080p efi fb.

Here is an example of a patch.

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I have tried to boot FreeBSD-aarch64-13.0-RELEASE-Rock-Pi-4C-20211031.img on my RPi4c from eMMC, uSD and NVME but I donā€™t get a picture on my 4K HDMI display so it appears not to boot.

Turns out my USB serial cable isnā€™t fast enough to be used with the 4c so Iā€™ll have to order another one before I can report any errors.

Has anyone got FreeBSD-aarch64-13.0-RELEASE-Rock-Pi-4C-20211031.img to boot?

About to buy an NVME SSD to be connected to my soon to arrive Rock PI 4. Wondering whether there are still issues with some brands/types. Planning to run FreeBSD (of course) and run it directly from the SSD. Having good experience with Samsung 980 (500GB or 1TB) hence that would be the fist choice.

Any experience or other feedback?