Re: Orange Pi 6 Plus works (15.1-RELEASE)

On 6/30/26 11:13, Adrian Chadd wrote:
> hi! do you have a recipe for building and flashing freebsd on the
> rockpro64 that I can try?
> 
> I have that hardware here (as well as bananapi and orangepi coming)
> and I'd really like to get freebsd-head builds running on these to
> help people who keep submitting us diffs. :-)

rockpro64 has snapshot and release distributions, for example matching
the patterns:

<https://download.freebsd.org/snapshots/ISO-IMAGES/16.0/FreeBSD-16.0-CURRENT-arm64-aarch64-ROCKPRO64-*-*-*.img.xz>

<FreeBSD-15.1-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-ROCKPRO64.img.xz>

The images can be dd'd to microsd cards or USB media or . . . Booting
does adjustments, such as adding swap and growing the file system space
to fit the media.

The bananapi and orangepi do not have such. But one can study how the
rockpro64 images are built, for example.

Also, these are all UFS based last I knew. You may care about other
aspects as well. So you may need to specify more context about the end
result you are after if the releases and snapshots are not sufficient.

So far as I know bsdinstall does not deal with the like of U-Boot and,
possibly, various things that go on the msdosfs.

> 
> 
> 
> a-
> 
> On Tue, 30 Jun 2026 at 05:46, John F Carr <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Jun 29, 2026, at 4:37 PM, Sulev-Madis Silber <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>
>> i'm surprised it works at all
>>
>> iirc, no multiple speed cpu systems have support in fbsd so far, i haven't even heard it being planned, so booting current is not likely to help either
>>
>> the more hw experienced guys(/gals?) can add additional info here or correct me or add any roadmaps
>>
>>
>> The RockPro64 is the same sort of computer, with 4 A53 and 2 A72.  FreeBSD has been running on it for years.  Mostly it works without problems.  The issues are
>> 1. Scheduling does not know when to prefer slow and fast cores, as noted above.
>> 2. Performance counters don't work because the CPUs have different sets of counters.
>>   https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=284736
>> 3. Loading the vmm module sometimes hangs the system.  Nobody knows why.  Somebody speculated the difference in cores was responsible.
>>   https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=277559
>>
>> I remember BSD on one of the small ARM systems didn't support different clock speeds on different groups of cores.  You'd like to put the fast cores into a lower power mode until a process on a slow core keeps using up its time slice.  If the fast cores can't be throttled down the decision is harder.  There may still be a power consumption difference between maximum clock rate executing wait instructions and maximum clock rate doing real work.
>>
>> John Carr
>>
>>
> 
> 


-- 
===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com