Re: Booting rock64 from USB SSD

On 2022-Apr-1, at 06:51, Łukasz Moskała <lm@lukaszmoskala.pl> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> I want to boot my rock64 from SSD (because all sd cards I could find are crap).
> 
> I followed those instructions to flash u-boot to SPI: https://github.com/ayufan-rock64/linux-build/blob/master/recipes/flash-spi.md
> 
> I was then able to boot FreeBSD from SSD (dd FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-ROCK64.img to SSD, just like it would be to SD card), but ethernet wasn't working. Actually, it could receive packets but no outgoing packets were sent. Not even ARP packets - switch didn't detect any device on that port, but link was UP
> 
> I assumed it was something to do with u-boot, so I erased u-boot from flash, then DD FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-ROCK64.img to SD card, and it worked without problems.
> 
> Do I understand correctly that this means that FreeBSD on rock64 uses custom u-boot? Can I somehow flash it to SPI?
> 
> Possible workaround that I can think of would be to put /boot on sd card, install u-boot to sd card, then put / on SSD.

My memory is that USB2 booting could be more normal, in that the
U-Boot from ports could access USB2 storage but not USB3 storage,
at least when I set this up long ago. I wanted USB3 use, thus the
below details.

I have U-Boot on the /media/ device below. As I remember, it could not
deal with the USB3 port, which is the one I wanted to use. The
FreeBSD kernel was the first stage that could deal with the USB3 port
back when I set up the Rock64 that I have access to.

I've not had to change the basic structure since I set it up. There
could be aspects that could be different these days and I'd not know.
Think of any comments as potentially being old information.

Note: mmcsd0 here is actually an eMMC device instead of the microsd
card slot contents, leaving the microsd card slot free for other uses.
But I'd used a microsd card this way before using the eMMC device
(as I remember anyway).

# gpart show -p
=>       63  244277185    mmcsd0  MBR  (116G)
         63      32705            - free -  (16M)
      32768     102312  mmcsd0s1  fat32lba  [active]  (50M)
     135080      28760            - free -  (14M)
     163840  241172480  mmcsd0s2  freebsd  (115G)
  241336320    2940928            - free -  (1.4G)

=>        0  241172480   mmcsd0s2  BSD  (115G)
          0  230686720  mmcsd0s2a  freebsd-ufs  (110G)
  230686720   10485760             - free -  (5.0G)

=>        40  1953525088    da0  GPT  (932G)
          40      532480  da0p1  efi  (260M)
      532520        2008         - free -  (1.0M)
      534528     7340032  da0p2  freebsd-swap  (3.5G)
     7874560     1048576         - free -  (512M)
     8923136    23068672  da0p3  freebsd-swap  (11G)
    31991808     2097152         - free -  (1.0G)
    34088960    33554432  da0p4  freebsd-swap  (16G)
    67643392  1740636160  da0p5  freebsd-ufs  (830G)
  1808279552     4194304  da0p6  freebsd-swap  (2.0G)
  1812473856   141051272         - free -  (67G)

For reference, from "gpart show -pl" :

    67643392  1740636160  da0p5  Rock64root  (830G)

(The USB drive can boot other systems as well, with
widely varying amounts of RAM. Thus the efi partition
and the odd set of freebsd-swap partitions.)

So, /media/ below is mmcsd0s1's fat32lba and /mnt/ is
mmcsd0s2a's freebsd-ufs. da0 is the USB3 SSD media,
which I do not give other details of here. (I manually
mounted these for this note.)

# ls -Tld /media/*/*/* /mnt/* /mnt/etc/*
-r-xr-xr-x   1 root  wheel  1243772 Jan 28 12:33:00 2022 /media/EFI/BOOT/bootaa64.efi
-r-xr-xr-x   1 root  wheel    50618 Jan 28 12:32:28 2022 /media/dtb/rockchip/rk3328-rock64.dtb
-r--r--r--   1 root  wheel     6170 Feb  1 04:48:34 2020 /mnt/COPYRIGHT
drwxr-xr-x  23 root  wheel     1536 Jan 28 15:26:41 2022 /mnt/boot
drwxr-xr-x   2 root  wheel      512 Apr 26 14:39:22 2020 /mnt/etc
-rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel       37 Dec 31 16:00:18 2009 /mnt/etc/hostid
drwx------   2 root  wheel    33280 Nov 27 09:46:08 2019 /mnt/lost+found

# ls -Tld /mnt/boot/dtb/overlays/rk3328-*
-r--r--r--  1 root  wheel   238 Jan 28 12:32:28 2022 /mnt/boot/dtb/overlays/rk3328-analog-sound.dtbo
-r--r--r--  1 root  wheel  1281 Jan 28 12:32:28 2022 /mnt/boot/dtb/overlays/rk3328-dwc3.dtbo

(I make no use of rk3328-analog-sound.dtbo .)

/mnt/boot/loader.conf has, in part,

# A msdosfs /MNTPNT/dtb/rockchip/rk3328-rock64.dtb
# copy of the ufs /boot/dtb/rockchip/rk3328-rock64.dtb
# uses the intended DTB in u-boot and the kernel --and
# avoids needing to tell the kernel where to find a
# copy . . .
#rk3328_rock64_load="YES"
#rk3328_rock64_type="dtb"
#rk3328_rock64_name="/boot/dtb/rockchip/rk3328-rock64.dtb"
#
# rk3328 USB3-related:
fdt_overlays="rk3328-dwc3.dtbo"
# ucom is not automatically being loaded when umodem is loaded at boot.
ucom_load="YES"
umodem_load="YES"
#
vfs.root.mountfrom="ufs:/dev/gpt/Rock64root"
kern.cam.boot_delay=10000
vfs.mountroot.timeout=10
vfs.root_mount_always_wait=1

===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com