NetBSD on Pinebook Pro

oui

Hey all! Long time lurker first time posting.
Want to start with a big thank you to everyone on UnitedBSD, really like this community.

Regarding NetBSD on the Pinebook Pro, I'm curious to know if anyone has any tips and tricks or just would like to share how they run NetBSD on the PBP. I recently got my hands on the PBP and I'm in love with this little machine - it's very close to reach daily driver status, only things missing for me is stable wifi and tearfree video playback. The bwfm driver has improved a lot in CURRENT and only hangs sometimes - unless I stream video, then it usually hangs within a minute.

Would really appreciate some insight on how you guys are running NetBSD on the PBP and what you have done to make it run better.

Any general discussion regarding NetBSD and Pinebook Pro are also welcomed.

Cheers,
Carl

Jay

oui Hi Carl,

Welcome to Community..

Here is one good blog https://bentsukun.ch/posts/pinebook-pro-netbsd/

Also here is thread where it was discussed a bit: https://www.unitedbsd.com/d/224-arm-devices

oui

Jay Thanks for the links!

qik I used to have NetBSD flashed to the EMMC, but now I'm running NetBSD on a SD card with a CURRENT image from https://www.armbsd.org

nia Thanks for sharing! Think I'll also use a USB wifi device until the bwfm driver gets more stable. Noticed that it is draining more than it can charge which is too bad - though still very very happy that the PBP just need 5 volts.

qik

I didn't have much luck running NetBSD so far. Wifi is unstable and it causes problems with the MMC module as well, making the filesystem unusable and forcing me to restart.

Are you booting NetBSD from an SD card?

nia

I use a ralink USB wifi device, the driver and firmware are a lot less scary than bwfm. By default the PBP seems to drain more power than the charger supplies so I have reduced the screen brightness with sysctl.

qik

To set the backlight level I found out you can run sysctl -w hw.pwmbacklight0.level=$LEVEL, where $LEVEL can be anywhere between 0 and 255.

Battery level can be checked with envstat