The future of Penta HAT & RockPi 4C?

#1

Purchased two of the RockPi 4c NAS bundles a while back. At the time it was a nightmare figuring out which distro to use and how I would get ZFS working.

I ended up with Armbian Buster with kernel 4.4 Had to make sure I didn’t upgrade. I now since stop using both units because they’re time bombs. Powered one up and went through with an upgrade and yep it killed the install.

So went off yet again on the mission to attempt to get this working. Honestly surprised that there’s still no solution with all the time that has past. I can not use Bullseye because there is a lack of support via Radxa repo. Therefore no radxarockpi4b-rk-u-boot-latest or rockpi4-dtbo. Which pretty much makes this unit useless considering I would like to use ZFS along with the fan which is a must.

It appears I am yet again restricted to an older kernel and disabling updates?

#2

I’ve been running my 4c with sata hat on FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE-p2 for 4 months. I almost forgot about it since I use that ZFS pool for some cold backups.

Here are some builds that work on the RockPi:
https://personalbsd.org/?page_id=2

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#3

Interesting but this lends me to wonder about support for getting the fan and or display to work? I am also not familiar with FreeBSD. Not sure how “easy” this would be for me to achieve.

#4

Getting the fan and LCD to work is on my todo. Just got pushed due to the little thing sitting in my basement.

#5

Well you have given me a partial solution. I do have the option to install FreeBSD and get ZFS going. However the idea of having a few 2.5" HDD in this enclosure without a fan is asking for trouble.

#6

The kit I bought from allnet.china came with a fan but it’s just running at full speed.

#7

I had done some work on the penta hat software (Penta SATA HAT enhanced display (oled, I/O, temp) and operation (button, fan)), but you should start with the instructions in https://wiki.radxa.com/Penta_SATA_HAT to do the basic install, which should get you the base software, and check it out…
If that works for you, and you are interested trying my changes, you would substitute in the 4 python files to /usr/bin/rockpi-penta. the defaulting should let you use the /etc/rockpi-penta.conf, but you can update that too, and setup you disk and network monitoring.

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#8

My adventures so far…

There isn’t an Armbian 20.05 for the RockPi 4C the oldest is 20.08. I used the legacy version with kernel 4.4 as anything else would be unusable for my situation. Of course the install for the SATA HAT and display worked. However, road block was not able to install linux headers as they’re needed for ZFS.

Installed FreeBSD (thanks @darkmode) which seems promising so far. Actually surprised how will it works. If only we had a way to get the fan/display working. It would be my solution!

Installed portsnap and now attempting to get Webmin installed…

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#9

Well it is FreeBSD. :laughing:

I’m sure you’ll find a solution soon for the fan. It’s totally doable, but on my personal backlog right now.