@Corsaire keyboard is "meh". trackpad is button-less so requires configuration to be not-stupid.

I'm planning to only use the built-in linux long enough to see that it boots.

@Corsaire (that said, I think the keyboard and trackpad can be quite usable as a secondary / travel machine)

@phessler I'm definitely keeping an eye on that one and how well it works for OpenBSD.

@phessler US $89? That's ridiculous.

@mherrb Registered June 2, shipping was planned for ~July 28. Actual shipping Aug 3, arrived in Germany Aug 5, faffed about with Customs until today.

@phessler aaaawwwww :(

kettenis@ has made some commits which will help. so, I'm building a release on my rpi3. slow, slow, slow, slow.

sadly, those commits didn't help.

Since I can't see any output (good *or* bad), I'm blocked until I can get a headphone jack serial adapter. It's in the mail, but is supposed to arrive on Monday :(.

in the meantime, I've started chatting with the pine64 people. super nice, and are *very* interested in helping us.

grmbl, looks like the pinebook still requires the boot0 proprietary firmware.

sigh. this is going to be a lot more work than I expected.

@phessler excellent! Hard work is wonderful. I can watch it all day. So please post your progress here.

@mwlucas should I tell the goat more about Chicago?

@phessler dammit, if the goat gets hurt on this little escapade, I'm screwed with the whole community. Don't encourage him!

@mwlucas I have hints, but still no serial. this box is dang weird.

IT BOOTS!

If I use the sopine boot blocks, then #OpenBSD boots on the #arm64 Pinebook laptop.

However, the serial cable is super wonky, so most of the output is corrupted, and Tx is broken :/

here, have a dmesg: http://theapt.org/pinebook.dmesg

#openbsd #arm64 pinebook

no packages, so I'm building everything locally. python just took 20 minutes, but gcc-linaro is on hour 7 so far :/.

all will be super worth it, once I can build u-boot and dtb files :D.

(those are involved in the firmware for arm64, and I need to hack on the firmware so I can have a not-shitty experience)

and of course, I was building the wrong gcc-linaro. that was the 32bit arm, but I need the 64bit arm version.

le sigh.

@phessler how do you know what needs to be done?

@bugabinga looking at what hardware isn't visible from the OS, and lots of guessing and reading datasheets

@phessler I am sufficiently uneducated about this stuff to find it magic. But also very interesting!

@bugabinga it's a bit harder on intel-based machines, because a lot of that stuff isn't documented well (if at all).

Find the specs for a machine, then look up some of the pieces. see if you can figure out how the kernel discovers that the hardware is there (hint: pci discovery). Keep iterating over that process :).

yesterday, I received a serial cable that works. (https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B0082FHNO6/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1)

I can see all of the u-boot output, and interact with it. this will make life a lot easier.

@phessler good luck 👍🏻

@Corsaire thanks!

there is active work to get the #pinebook LCD support into mainline u-boot. apparently it is functional as of early this morning. I'll test it with #openbsd tonight when i get home!

lookong forward to this :D

it works. I see text on the pinebook's LCD screen with a patched u-boot. I can also use the text console on openbsd.

no X, but we're not done yet....

@phessler I've started learning C by writing simple framebuffer experiments. Let's see how many years it'll take me to work on something useful as you are :)

@v3ritas haven't spent a huge amount of time on it. #openbsd boots and has text console with some uncommitted patches.

no suspend/resume, no battery info, no X, usb is funky. very unlikely to get any of those fixed before 6.2.

imho, not yet usable. but, there is hope it will be.

@phessler Sounds good. Thanks for the info. For now I think I'm best off just killing XServer& using it as just a terminal with a nice screen. St least performance would be acceptable.

@v3ritas yea, the performance without SMP is 22min to build a kernel, and the system is usable during that. not too shabby!

oh yea, no emmc yet, either :/

@phessler Looks like I have a bit of a project for the weekend =]

@v3ritas if you don't mind no graphics at all (including in u-boot), you can just use the sopine u-boot binary, and slap it on disk.

pkg_add u-boot-aarch64 and dd if=sopine/u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin of=/dev/sd9c bs=1024 seek=8

it isn't in miniroot or bsd.rd, so you'll need to do that with another system involved.

@phessler I'll definitely look j to that. Thanks.