Raspberry pi alternatives (aarch64)

There's zero support for Amlogic, Allwinner (H6 and older) and Rockchip (mainly RK3399) have best support available when it comes to "cheap" SBC.
There's preliminary support for Pine64 Quartz64 in -CURRENT but it's far from complete. Given your requirements your best bet would be RockPi4 or Pine64's RockPro64 however due to hardware limitations 4Gbyte RAM is max. They're doable buildboxes but it will take time(tm) and you have to be careful with ports that consumes a lot of memory such as llvm (flang) or GCC. Allwinner works well however they're limited to 3Gbyte or less despite having 4Gbyte in some cases. There is only official support for mainline u-boot , if you need to use forks etc you're on your own unless/til you're willing to submit upstream. Scan the ports tree for u-boot ports and you'll pretty much see what's supported.

For Rockchip you also have https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm/RockChip

If you want beefier ARM64 hardware Ten64 and/or Solid-Run have some offerings that are quite well supported.
 
nunotex said:
Hi,

Is wifi card supported?

Never understanded why is so hard to find wifi chipsets in most of vendors:
  • LAN
    Gigabit LAN (Realtek 8111HS)
  • Wifi Card
    Dual Band Wireless-802.11 AC
Click to expand...
TBH I usually ignore the wifi chip in this situation. Most of the time they come with cheap Azurewave cards or equivalent, and as you said it too vendors change chipsets ad libitum and sometimes just don't mention what they put in exactly.
What I usually do in these cases is I simply swap the stock one with a good compatible one (usually a Broadcom) that I get off eBay or similar auction sites. They're mini-PCIe cards that can be easily exchanged one with another. It solves the problem radically.
 
A very interesting and promising device is the Firefly Station-M2 on Rockchip RK3566.

Especially in the 8Gb RAM version with NVMe.
On it you can use Tianocore EDK2 Bootloader to install OS such as
FreeBSD, NetBSD, VMware ESXi, Windows 11, and many more.

And this is on a device slightly larger than a credit card.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1635229622706262017
View: https://twitter.com/jmcwhatever/status/1635229622706262017?s=61&t=YEvJARBzAHVTXETAiZTYaQ

E6FA2305-37C1-45F0-A8CC-581D351EA2E1.png

92CDFB9D-1AA8-4ACA-BE00-8FAF5FC7E9FE.jpeg
 
SleepWalker said:
A very interesting and promising device is the Firefly Station-M2 on Rockchip RK3566.

Especially in the 8Gb RAM version with NVMe.
On it you can use Tianocore EDK2 Bootloader to install OS such as
FreeBSD, NetBSD, VMware ESXi, Windows 11, and many more.

And this is on a device slightly larger than a credit card.
Click to expand...
This smells like an advertisement...
 
Naw it's just the latest and greatest Rockchip board.
I wonder if my RK3568 is supported yet? The boards look very similar.
Rock 3A
ameridroid.com

ROCK 3A

ROCK 3A is an improved version of the ROCK Pi 4. KEY FEATURES RK3568, Quad A55 up to 2GHz, Mali G52 GPU, 0.8T NPU eMMC module socket, 2GB/4GB/8GB LPDDR4 3200MT/s, DRAM controller frequency up to 1560MHz uSD slot supports up to 128G uSD card QC/PD power support, with a new generation QC/PD...
ameridroid.com ameridroid.com

PCIe fixes sound interesting. These have 2242 M.2 slot for PCIe and NVMe on bottom with adapter.
 
I wonder if we will ever see a GENERIC-ROCKCHIP image for FreeBSD.
That would be nice. There are quite a few RK flavors these days.
 
I like the orientation of the ports on the Rock Pi 5B. The EspressoBin used the same and I like that feature.
Ports all on one long edge. Just like your typical SBC.

Rock5 - Radxa Wiki

wiki.radxa.com wiki.radxa.com

It makes designing a case so much simpler.
 
Phishfry said:
Naw it's just the latest and greatest Rockchip board.
I wonder if my RK3568 is supported yet?
The boards look very similar. Rock 3A
Click to expand...
I was able to get FreeBSD 14.O-CURRENT running on a Radxa Rock 3A using this Tianocore EDK2 bootloader.


Does anyone else have experience running FreeBSD on different RK35XX boards?
What are the results?
It seems to me there are problems with the implementation of PCIe.

And you?
 
Phishfry said:
Which current image? RockPro64 ??

So what is dd command for this EFI flashing?

dd if=/ROCK3A_EFI.itb of=/dev/da0 bs=1M seek=??? conv=sync
dd if=/ROCK3A_EFI.img of=/dev/da0 bs=1M seek=??? conv=sync
dd if= FreeBSD-14.0-CURRENT-arm64-aarch64-ROCKPRO64-20230309.img of=/dev/da0 bs=1M seek=???conv=sync
Click to expand...

It's simple enough and similar to U-boot.
*.img is the full UEFI BootLoader image.
It is easy enough to write it to an SD card.
For example for Rock 3A
dd if=ROCK3A_EFI.img of=/dev/da0 bs=1M status=progress

BootLoader consists of two parts just like U-boot.

The first part is idblock.bin
dd if=${UBOOT_PATH}/idblock.bin of=/dev/${DISK_MD} bs=512 seek=64 conv=notrunc

The second part is UEFI
dd if=${UBOOT_PATH}/u-boot.itb of=/dev/${DISK_MD} bs=512 seek=20480 conv=notrunc

Here u-boot.itb is for example ROCK3A_EFI.itb for Rock 3A, or QUARTZ64_EFI.itb for Pine Quartz64A,
or ROC-RK3566-PC_EFI.itb for Firefly Station M2, etc.

UEFI is written to an SD card and will be able to boot a GENERIC FreeBSD image from USB for example,
or NVMe (if UEFI has PCIe support).

For Rock 3A PCIe does not work yet.
The source code can be viewed here.
github.com

GitHub - S199pWa1k9r/edk2-rk356x: A port of Tianocore EDK II to the RK356x boards.

A port of Tianocore EDK II to the RK356x boards. Contribute to S199pWa1k9r/edk2-rk356x development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com github.com

Rock 3A should work HDMI, Ethernet, Blue USB ports.
I'm trying to reverse port support RK356X in 13.2,
test SD card image for Rock 3A, here

But all this needs to be tested.
Full support is currently only on Firefly Station-M2. :(

Unlike UEFI images from Jared McNeill I prefer to build them with FDT support.
Therefore it is possible to test FreeBSD in two modes FDT or ACPI.
This can be adjusted in /boot/loader.conf
# cat board/GENERIC-RK356X/overlay/boot/loader.conf

#
# Hack to get loader to find dtb.
#
#dtbfile_load="YES"
#dtbfile_type="dtb"
#dtbfile_name="rk3566-firefly-roc-pc.dtb"
#dtbfile_name="rk3568-firefly-roc-pc.dtb"
#dtbfile_name="rk3568-nanopi-r5s.dtb"

# Define acpi or fdt
kern.cfg.order="acpi"
#kern.cfg.order="fdt"

# Kernel params
hw.usb.usbhid.enable="1"
hw.regulator.disable_unused="0"
kern.geom.label.gptid.enable="0"
kern.geom.label.disk_ident.enable="0"

# Network via USB
#if_ure_load="YES"
#if_axge_load="YES"

# Realtek
#if_re_load="YES"
#if_re_name="/boot/modules/if_re.ko"

# Wireles Network
#if_ath_load="YES"
#if_ath_pci_load="YES"

# ZFS settings
#cryptodev_load="YES"
#zfs_load="YES"
#vfs.root.mountfrom="zfs:zroot/ROOT/default"

# Delay in seconds before autobooting,
autoboot_delay="3"

# BOOT options
#boot_verbose="NO"
#loader_color="YES"
#beastie_disable="NO"

# Enable GOP console
boot_serial="NO"
console="efi"

# Multiple console (serial+efi gop) enabled.
#boot_serial="YES"
#boot_multicons="YES"
#console="comconsole"

 
SleepWalker said:
idblock.bin
Click to expand...
Thanks for your support. I missed that file.

I erased my asking for directions for flashing. I thought I could figure it out myself.

Now I see I did need your help. Similar to u-boot but different.

SleepWalker said:
test SD card image for Rock 3A, here
Click to expand...
You really deserve kudos for this.

I just burned it to microSD and poked it and this stood out to me:

/boot/loader.conf
hw.regulator.disable_unused="0"

All I can say is WOW. That setting is probably going to cure my Rock64 on eMMC issues.

Double bang for team rockchip.
 
Phishfry said:
Thanks for your support. I missed that file.

I erased my asking for directions for flashing. I thought I could figure it out myself.

Now I see I did need your help. Similar to u-boot but different.


You really deserve kudos for this.

I just burned it to microSD and poked it and this stood out to me:

/boot/loader.conf
hw.regulator.disable_unused="0"

All I can say is WOW. That setting is probably going to cure my Rock64 on eMMC issues.

Double bang for team rockchip.
Click to expand...
Enjoy, Welcome to FreeBSD on Rockchip RK35xx...
 
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