The PicoPSUs are pretty good, but I don’t know how you split them to 12V, besides just sing the 24 pin connector and connecting it to the RockPro64 via a 5.5 / 2.1mm barrel jack, and jumping the PSU pins to have the PSU always on.
I would rather use a 19v with a stepdown converter, which is what I have now.
There is an alternative to the lovely toaster? Besides making your own? Interesting. Well, I still like my toaster, the only issue is that I could not get ZFS on it yet. BTRFS was running fine, but given that most stuff here will be ZFS, I want to keep things consistent, which is why I was forced to buy another rkpr64 for now. Eventually the toaster will be just an on-demand backup server.
I have hit a brick wall with the amount of BS I have to deal with with the RockPro64 and official case.
The cables are putting a lot of strain on the SSDs’ connectors if you are not careful. Then you can only supposedly power 2 drives using the included power cable that connects to the rkpr64. Well, stupid me because I didn’t research it more thoroughly. I am supposed to get a 12v brick and a step-down converter to get 5v and add these to the SATA cables myself. The worst part? I have a 19v that I need to lower to 12v, so I need yet another step-down converter to get 5v.
Wow, I can’t believe the amount of BS I have to go through with this. Better be worth it to put an 80mm Noctua fan on this thing, it will run at 100% all the time (2 pins only, 12v and GND), so I need to get the lower RPM ones.
The HC4 has all you need built-in. And comes with a 15v brick and the board does all the voltage step-downs for you. But no support for 4 drives obviously. But support is not explicit for the RockPro64 either.
And here is inside it. 4 Wago connectors, 6 wires for 12v, 4 wires for 5v. The heatshrink is just aesthetic in this picture, I miss ketchup and mustard cable. Actually, k&m is the best thing possible when working with cables that can be mismatched and plugged in the wrong connector.
This is the connection coming from 2x 5.5mm x 2.1mm barrel jack into the sata cable. It is literally a 12v and a 5v rail. No solder, so I ripped a lot of material and did a strong wire twist, then heatshrink which actually does serve its purpose, then black tape on top. The yellow heatshrink tube was too large, so I only used it on top of the black one that went on top of the red one, for the 18awg cable (use tubes that fit your gauge).
Do not buy straight sata cables for the HDDs, get the 90 degrees ones, you will hit the fan blades. Same for the power cables. Get the kind that goes up and down. Besides, those are the best cables, because the wires are snapped into metal teeth, from many people’s testings, those are the kind that are least likely to catch on fire.
The SSD cables do not work if they are 90 degrees. Use straight ones. They are also very tight fit, but the 90 deg cables would not allow the cage to screw in the base.
This thing has been running for about 1 day and a half without catching fire. It has not been under much load. Runs FreeBSD. Need to configure vlans and routes on boot and rc.conf doesn’t really work for some reason. PEBKAC most likely.
I haven’t even set up the SSD ZFS pool, I only imported the pool I had on the HDDs, but I can barely wait to put this in production, I want to use the Pi 2 for something else.
Out of curiosity, is that a ASM1166 based adapter and would you mind sharing model/link and what version of FreeBSD you’re running? I can at least verify that rc.conf works as expected on aarch64
It’s a StarTech 6 port AHCI SATA card. dmesg shows it’s an ASMedia 116x card, so one of these. It says it’s AHCI v1.31. Supposedly has 32 ports in dmesg, with port multiplier not supported.
When I set them up manually with ifconfig and route, it all works ok. But until then, networking doesn’t work.
It looks like the interfaces get created, but they never come up. So I’m left just setting the ip and turning them up, then adding the default route. More specifically, I need to turn on dwc0 on as well, until I can ping and ssh into the nas.
Am considering this as a good alternative for Pi. Would need to either build a OS or convert a supported one from the website. Seems to be able to run Debian (I dunno how you feel about it) but it’s something I am familiar with. While there’s not as much about Raspberry Pi, there are some good posts/articles/“rants”/projects out there.
I was inspired to post here because of the original goal of this post. I also didn’t see much about this board here (this post and or L1 in general). Also, Pi prices are so dumb now a board like this is very appealing. I know it uses a different APU and has other differences, but I don’t see many. I chose this board over there “Le Patato” due to the upgrade from a 100 Mb Fast Ethernet NIC to a 1GB NIC. Figured this would offer more flexibility for network focused tasks (IE OpnSense/PFSense/file server). Also, it uses 4GB DDR4-2133 SDRAM which I believe is faster than Pi and may be better for VM’s and a server like Proxmox or similar uses.
@ThatGuyB - You might have avoided this for a specific reason. IE not compatible with certain OS’s or what not. I’d be happy to test to the best of my technical ability’s (or coaching) if you would like add this to your archive here for others and your own reference.
Let me know what you would like me to play with/attempt with this board. My plans or things I might like to try are making a HA (High Availability for those who don’t know) stack maybe with Kubernetes and some service like pi-hole or another service like Nginx to do a proxy of some kind because I’d like to lear to use that program.
Just a thought. I added a link to the devices web page above. Has all the specs so I wont repeat that here. Also, the wiring diagram is under the “Help” section, which seemed weird for me. I would have thought it would be under “Downloads” at least in my mind. I only mention that because I tried searching the net for one before I found it on their page lol.
Obligatory Pics for viewing- Seems like a quality board from a physical inspection. Traces and soldering all seem solid so build and quality checks seem good.
Also- I know you had been having problems with SD Cards… This board has the option to install a eMMC v 5.x Chip to boot from on the back of the board. This may remove the SD image corruption/flashing issues you were having at one point if I remember right. Also, it is supposed to help with processing speeds via much faster IOPS (not sure thats would be the right term).
Full build I’ll be using for testing (I added the aluminum heat sinks-I like things running cool. Also, there is a way to get the clock speed up to 2Ghz from 1.5 I think stock).
I like the compatibility with Pi 2 and 3s in the form factor. This can lead to a lot of cool projects. And it’s a good replacement for old guides that were using these. I still have my Pi 2 and 3 and I’m not giving them up until they say goodbye to this world.
I don’t mind Debian. The only reason I haven’t been running it, was because I found weird bugs in apt and apt-get, where the download speed on aarch64 was horrendous. Like, ludicrously bad, we’re talking 5 kbps speeds. On the same network, x86(_64) apt was working flawlessly. This only happened to me on Debian arm, I was forced to run the official Odroid Ubuntu at some point (but that ended up being useless due to the deprecated kernel). Never found the root cause for the apt slowness bug, didn’t care to report it either, I just stopped using it.
There was some other thing with the debian kernel, that also affected void, but I managed to fix it by adding some build tools from github to. I suppose the same fix would have applied for debian when building the zfs dkms.
Keep in mind OPNSense / pfSense only run on x86_64. But I can guide you to set up a Linux or BSD router and file server. I am running FreeBSD on my RockPro64 (you probably already read that, I didn’t look through all the posts you liked, I just assume you did).
I’m not particularly interested in the boards themselves, for me they are just different computers, like servers from HP and Dell are for others. The reason this whole thread exist is to show the steps I took in the setup process and the pain I’ve been through along the way. I should probably do a wiki entry for them, to help people skip all the garbage flood comments. The thread was also a way for me to remember what I tried and what not (and it was helpful to some degree, although finding the information I was looking for was difficult).
Anything you can test on aarch64 will do. If debian runs well for you and you are ok with it, by all means use it. Debian is a good distro.
I would suggest that if you install k8s / k3s / k0s / microk8s, to go with lxc / lxd first on the board. You can make multiple linux containers, enable nested containerization, then install whatever k8s stack you choose inside those linux containers. That way, you can test your HA stack on a single computer at first, without having to buy more of these. Of course, nothing stops you from setting up pi-hole or pi-vpn or whatnot inside lxc directly, but I suppose you are interested in OCI containers.
Maybe I was sounding too annoyed, alarming or overzealous, but I never once had a problem with the SD cards. The only thing even remotely close to this would be with my Toshiba Encore on Windows, when dumb windows just decides that “there is an sd card inserted, but cannot be accessed” (unplugging and plugging back fixes it, but of course, corruption can occur, so I just had to reboot to make it work).
I thankfully never had an SD card go bad on me yet. And my SDs have seen quite some torture. I had issues booting SD cards, mostly because some isos don’t like dd that much, but work just fine with rufus or balena etcher on windows (which is completely insane to me). I also had lots of issues with booting in general, non-related to SD cards, because of the bootloaders (u-boot and to a lesser degree, petitboot, but the later was very smart about many things, just that the linux kernel was not loading something properly, maybe not having support for the boards compiled into it, I assume).
I did talk about netboot in my adventures a lot. It had made experimentation so much easier, than having to plug and unplug SD cards constantly to change back to the old initramfs, kernel and dtb. Although it seemed like SDs and eMMCs are better for booting, apparently PXE has some issues when loading kernel images, that the boards can load from SDs just fine.
The discussion about netboot also kinda devolved into trying to avoid SD card problems. I also talked about the Pi 3 running alpine, which boots everything into RAM, protecting my SD cards. But I since then switched to emmc, because of the aforementioned boot issues that aren’t a thing on local storage. The only exception is the hc4, which only has an sd slot, but it’s currently off (no disks and I couldn’t really boot something with zfs properly on it).
Sorry about that. My misunderstanding. Thought it might be useful to try different SBC’s (Single Board Computers) for different usage scenarios due to Raspberry Pi being so expensive right now.
I must have read it somewhere else. I’ve been away so long I’ll have to review my notes.
Yeah this board compared to some others also offered a USB 3.0 socket for booting from a external drive as well.
Status Update Rant
Heck, I’m just happy I got my Postfix done on my main Proxmox Server to send me Email’s about my ZFS scrub results every month, and fairly sure I have my SmartDisk info set to email me if there is an issue there from the self checks everyday (Fast tests) and weekly Long Tests. I’ll have to figure out how to simulate a smart failure just to see if I get notified.
I think my next big project is going to be finding good software for a NVR (Network Video Recorder) I can run on a VM in the home server that has Motion detection and notification either via email or text. I hope to get PTZ (Pan/Tilt/Zoom) PoE Cameras for the house. I have the green light from the wife for low voltage wiring in the house AND to finally add drops in the rooms that need it vs 1 out of the 5 that should have it but do not…Argh
Realized I’m ranting so I will hide this less relavent info. lol
I think even if the RPi was normal priced, that there are better options out there anyway. The RockPro64 and Odroid N2+ are way better computers for software use only. The only advantage the Pi has is the hardware accessories built around it. Especially the Pi CM4, but I believe that to be a bad direction we are heading to.
Even the HomeAssistant officially supported board kit is using the Odroid N2+, you can buy it from them. And the RockPro64 has a lot of support from many linux distros and BSDs. The HC4 is still somewhat new, so support isn’t exactly there yet, but I can barely wait for when it will be able to run FreeBSD.
Not sure about Radxa and Khadas boards, but they are out there too. As long as you can install linux on them, you can just run whatever software you want, k8s, lxd, nfs, you name it. The only downsides to the less supported boards is that you will have a hard time building ZFS on them, which at this point I think it should be included everywhere. Which is why I’m not using the HC4 yet.
The major issue with SBCs are that if they’re unsupported you’re going to have issues keeping them up to date since they’re unsupported upstream (both u-boot and OS/distro).
For now at least you should have very low expectations regarding Amlogic support on FreeBSD, no one is actively working it.
Compiled zfs dkms on the odroid n2+. I also had an upgrade from kernel 5.15.82 to 5.15.85. I only built it for .85. Built the uinitrd, changed the symlinks… nope, no boot. Silly me for not checking if the new kernel would even boot on it before I compile it, because last time I tried upgrading to kernel 6, I couldn’t boot.
I seriously don’t understand how the bootloader works. I noticed it on u-boot on both the n2+ and the rkpr64. If I boot a clean image, without messing with the kernel, it just works if I switch the symlinks around (pointing to the proper kernel image, initramfs and dtb). If I compile ZFS or the stupid realtek wifi driver, fails to boot instantly.
I am now on a clean 6.0.15 kernel on my n2+. On my rkpr64, I’m still on 5.18.19 (bad security practice to tell people that you are running an old version of a kernel and the exact version), because I can’t get the dkms module to build into linux 6. Supposedly the kernel 6 and 6.1 have the driver for rtl88x2bu, but the usb never shows up if I boot those cleanly.
ZFS is not a must for my n2+, but would have been nice to run zfs FS through iscsi on a zvol. But I can just as well do ext4 and still benefit from zfs in the backend anyway. But the driver module for realtek if a must. I am stuck right now. Maybe at some point, I’ll just work around the wifi thing by using ethernet (and finally be able to run OpenBSD on the rockpro64).
I netbooted to an armbian kernel I know worked, using petitboot (thankfully, it’s a matter of changing a switch position on the n2+). Chrooted into the emmc rootfs, uninstalled zfs and using the previously working uInitrd (the one without zfs module in), I booted just fine on emmc. Just now upgraded to the latest linux 6.1 on my n2+.
I can’t even begin to imagine where I need to look to troubleshoot kernel modules boot-up, as u-boot has no output on the screen on the n2+. Maybe I could use the uart I got for the odroid stuff. I don’t know if the same uart is compatible with the rockpro64, it would be nice if it was and I just needed to jump cables on other pins.
Today I was shocked to see that OpenBSD of all things boots on the HC4 (if you delete petitboot and use u-boot).
I’ll be just formatting the iscsi zvol target as ext4 and install linux containers on it that way for now.
While I haven’t messed around much with compiling Linux kernels are you sure that it gets compiled with the correct dtb/dts(i) file? I wouldn’t also be too surprised if something broke along the way, that seems to occur relatively frequently in Linux ARM-land unfortunately.
USB wifi works poorly at best in general, I would highly recommend you to get a wifi bridge instead if possible. Pretty much any “wifi extender” with an ethernet port supports it or you could have a look if you have a device (router or access point) that supports OpenWrt which also act as one.
UART should be the same but baudrate probably isn’t.
Irregardless of OS/distro, boots doesn’t necessarily mean that you can use it as a daily driver so to say.
If I was compiling the kernel, it might have been easier (just build the drivers instead of relying on dtb), but I’m not compiling it at all, I only get the repo version and build a module. The only thing that gets compiled is the dkms zfs module, which just gets added via modprobe. The compilation is successful, but the boot is not. So we can remove the variable, it’s the same kernel and the same kernel image.
The difference lies in the initramfs / uInitrd (which I’m regenerating from the freshly made initramfs containing the kernel module). Remove the module from the system (/usr/lib/modules/linuxX.Y/extras/zfs) and use the previously generated uInitrd and the system boots as usual.
You mean daily driving me nuts?
In all seriousness, what can a SBC that has no OS running on it do?
Correct me if I misunderstand, but did you mean to say that even if the OS boots properly, it doesn’t mean I should rely on the SBC?
This shouldn’t be very difficult to debug. Does the kernel module load on the running system with the original initrd without causing trouble?
If you add init=/sysroot/bin/sh or rd.break or break to your boot command-line you should drop into the initramfs shell. There you can step through the init process, manually loading the module, and see where things are going wrong.
