I’m wondering if any one is daily driving NetBSD on the Reform/ Pocket? Or generally what the state of support looks like.
There are a couple of reasons Net is an attractive option, and running it on the rk3588 is something I’m interested in doing but hoping I wouldn’t be starting from 0.
As I understand things, I’d need a device tree config for uboot (or maybe the edk2 loader? ) and probably some drivers for querying the system controller. This also looks pretty promising
Not sure about gpu … This would definitely be quite the learning project though…
I recently tried a NetBSD 11 release candidate and the boot process gets stuck somewhere and it just hangs. Here is the output from the boot attempt. Note this is with the normal u-boot bootloader; edk2 has never worked for me at all.
Ooh thanks for this! Is the last line a prompt? Or does I/o stop or hang? Noticing there’s no indication the kernel found any partitions from which to continue loading (usually theres a “dk0 at sd0” or similar line)… I recall sd card issues being a persistent issue for rpi as well. What device was being booted from?
Nope, it just hangs. This was booting from a USB drive. I had patched u-boot to enumerate and probe the USB ports. Presumably you could do just as well with an SD card, but I haven’t tried it.
I am very interested in this question, as well. I ordered an MNT Reform Next last year, and was planning to just run it as-is when I get it, at least initially, as this will be my first MNT (or open hardware in any way) computer, and I expect a bit of a learning curve even if I stick with what’s most supported. However, the embrace of LLM slop in the Linux kernel and, most sadly, Debian, now has me looking at moving all of my systems to NetBSD.
I do have some fear of immediately bricking my brand new, expensive, purple laptop when I get it. However, right at the offset, before I have anything (data-wise) to lose might be the best time for me to try. I’ll continue to watch this space, and if I see other people working on it who might be able to help me overcome a hurdle or two, maybe I will try installing NetBSD on my Next when it arrives.
As the Debian-guy, I feel that sentiment and am also looking at NetBSD because it seems to be the only practically useful kernel with a strict policy against inclusion of LLM generated content: NetBSD Commit Guidelines
If somebody gets netbsd running, even if it’s without display and without pci and i just have serial I’d certainly be interested in giving that a try…
We have pretty promising OpenBSD support, on Pocket Reform with a little help of our RK3588 display driver work in Barebox (bootloader), which we’re also gonna port to u-boot later this year. And someone independently got OpenBSD display support working for the classic RK3588 MNT Reform. I guess it should be possible to port missing drivers to NetBSD from OpenBSD?
The result, even if “fully working” is also likely to appeal to a very different type of user. Things like Wine are iffy on Net. Limited support for MTP (for anyone that expects to plug in their phone and mount a drive). Incomplete Rust compatibility (wscons related iirc) … FreeBSD is, pragmatically, the likely better choice from a "modern desktop experience " perspective, but Net’s strengths may lend themselves very well to a number of folks’ sensibilities mainly: a strict no AI policy; an emphasis on clean, easy to maintain, and correct code; portability across architectures; and a more traditional unix philosophy of simpler tools over abstractions. At least my interpretation. I’m also cautiously optimistic that enough folks looking towards the BSDs right now will help result in some of those gaps getting closed.
Either way, I use Net enough that it will be something I’ll be poking at. I’m planning on dedicating some time when I get my Next, and eventually on the quasar+pocket combo to Net. It would be awesome if these could become a reference device for “here’s a compute ecosystem where basically everything just works”.
I’ve never done any real driver work before…tbh I’m really really hoping that whatever I remember from my embedded systems days comes back - perhaps at the very least my experiences will lend insight in the form of what NOT to do
However, right at the offset, before I have anything (data-wise) to lose might be the best time for me to try. I’ll continue to watch this space, and if I see other people working on it who might be able to help me overcome a hurdle or two, maybe I will try installing NetBSD on my Next when it arrives.