headless netbsd installation

antoni

Hi,
I want to install NetBSD on PINE64 RockPro64. I flashed arm aarch64 netbsd image on my flash drive, plugged it into my RockPro64, also plugged monitor via HDMI-VGA adapter and keyboard via usb port. I powered my board on and... Nothing happend. Not even boot agent showed up on the monitor.

I'm assuming there is a problem with the HDMI-VGA adapter. So I have two options: make NetBSD work with the adapter or do a headless installation.

Unfortunately, I have never used NetBSD before, so I don't know how to do it. I have some experience with Linux, however.

oui

antoni The default ARM images on the NetBSD website doesn't come with board-specific U-Boot preinstalled for the PINE64 boards. Unless you want to configure U-Boot from pkgsrc yourself, it's recommended to install ARM images provided by Jared McNeill (NetBSD ARM developer) at https://www.armbsd.org/arm.

I have been running NetBSD on a RockPro64 as my daily driver for quite some time, so feel free to ask me anything.

antoni

As you said:
I downloaded NetBSD-9-aarch64-202011160610Z-rockpro64.img.gz, unpacked it and ran this command:
sudo dd if=NetBSD-9-aarch64-202011160610Z-rockpro64.img of=/dev/sdb bs=4M
Then I plugged the flash drive via USB 2.0 port, the keyboard via USB 2.0 port and my monitor via HDMI port and HDMI-VGA adapter to my RockPro64 and turned it on. Nothing happend. I switched the monitor mode from "auto detect" to "analog input". It just displayed "No signal, entering power save" message.

So I think it's probably because of unsupported adapter. I had also fan, ethernet cable and NVMe drive (via PCIe adapter) plugged into my RockPro64 when I done this test but it should work anyway.

oui

antoni Then I plugged the flash drive via USB 2.0 port

Are you trying to boot from USB? Without some tinkering, only booting from a SD card or eMMC is supported out of the box. I don't think your RockPro64 is broken, try using the same image as mentioned above and flashing it to a SD card. Even if your adapter isn't working, if the power LED (white) lights up when you plug it in we at least know your board is alive.

antoni

It looks like it's not the problem of the adapter. I plugged my RockPro64 to my TV via HDMI 2.0 cable and it didn't work. I only had flash drive, TV and fan plugged to my RockPro64 and my TV was displaying "NO SIGNAL". It looks like not only is this flash drive not booting but my RockPro64 is broken because it don't display any boot agent or logo or something

antoni

only booting from a SD card or eMMC is supported out of the box

Does it mean I won't be able to boot from NVMe?

oui

antoni It's possible to boot from a USB flash drive and SATA/NVMe etc but it requires some extra work in beforehand. I haven't done it myself so I'm afraid I can't be of much help here. The official RockPro64 wiki has instructions how to enable USB boot, I also found this from the NetBSD mailingIist which might be helpful. Either way, you first need to boot from a SD card or eMMC to flash U-Boot to SPI flash in order to enable USB boot.

nia

Pretty sure in most cases on ARM the bootloader lives on the SD card even if the actual OS is on other storage

antoni

Ok. Now I've gathered SD card reader and therefore flashed NetBSD image on it. It manages to boot and everything works great!