Gentoo on Orange Pi PC

vanjo9800 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 16 Mar 2015 Posts: 76

Hello all, after installing Gentoo on my two Raspberry Pis, I want to install it onto an Orange Pi PC. I consider the process similar, so I follow the entries in the wikis for the Raspberry Pi and the Orange Pi PC. I use firmware and kernel directly from loboris, but I experience the following problem.

The first time, I turned in the Orange Pi PC and it booted successfully, I tried to set up SSH. The first time, the Orange Pi failed to assign a dynamic IP because of error in /bin/busybox. So I assigned it one manually in order to SSH. When SSH-ed I tried again to assign a dynamic IP and this time it worked. I was delighted and wanted to leave it compile some things during the night. So I first started emerging tmux and htop. However, the Pi froze on Calculating dependencies. I waited some time. It was already connected to a monitor, so I tried with a external keyboard, but the Pi was completely frozen. So I restarted the brutal way, unplugging the power supply.
On the second boot, the kernel could not even load OpenRC. It froze before that. On the third boot, many read/write errors were displayed, but I am sure the SD card has no bad sectors because I have use it perfectly previously on a Pi Model B+. The fourth boot, OpenRC was loaded however it froze again before opening a TTY login shell. And that is how it stays now.

What have I done wrong and what is the problem?

Thank you very much in advance!!!

chithanh · Posted: Wed May 11, 2016 1:47 pm Post subject:

It is possible that your filesystem got corrupted. Can you connect the microSD card to a different computer and run fsck?
If that turns up nothing, a more thorough check would be to mount the root partition and then run

vanjo9800 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 16 Mar 2015 Posts: 76

The fsck does not give any errors, while the qcheck gives some errors with the SSL certificates and with one file from the GCC compiler. So I think these two errors should not be a problem during the boot process.

Now, the boot process got a constant behaviour, which means that every time the same thing happens, which I think is good. The boot process stops with these lines:

chithanh · Posted: Wed May 11, 2016 4:01 pm Post subject:

If you use a precompiled kernel, it might not have all the necessary kernel options enabled for OpenRC under certain circumstances (such as missing /dev nodes).

With the kernel extracted from the Debian image per the wiki, my Orange Pi PC boots fine.

vanjo9800 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 16 Mar 2015 Posts: 76

I use the precompiled kernel from Debian from the wiki. The problem was very silly. I use a 2A adapter with 2 slots and I have connected two things in it. The Orange Pi PC received too low current in order to boot properly.

I just forgot that the board is so sensitive for the current.
Thank you!!!

vanjo9800 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 16 Mar 2015 Posts: 76

Hello again,

The Orange Pi PC works fast and I SSH into it properly. However, I have a small problem. Sometimes when I compile a package the Orange Pi PC decides to turn off randomly and I should restart it in order to be able to use it again. Is this normal and what is the problem? Is it again the power supply( this time I give 2A and have nothing connected to the board).

Thank you in advance!!!

chithanh · Posted: Wed May 11, 2016 9:41 pm Post subject:

Could be the power supply, could also be overheating. The Allwinner H3 gets quite hot, and I had to attach a passive heatsink or else it would throttle almost immediately when compiling something.

vanjo9800 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 16 Mar 2015 Posts: 76

Yeah, thank you, the problem was in the power supply. I replaced it and now it works very smoothly. I even managed to put systemd onto it. But I face a problem, systemd which portage pools is too new for the kernel. Also, as you may already know, the kernel in the loboris' images is the one with the security problem when root access is given to an app when you echo "rootmydevice" somewhere, I do not remember now where exactly.

So my question is, have you managed to find a newer version of the kernel for the Orange Pi PC?

Thank you in advance!!!

chithanh · Posted: Mon May 23, 2016 9:34 pm Post subject:

Yes, you can find instructions how to get a mainline kernel onto the Orange Pi PC on the same wiki page when scrolling up:
http://linux-sunxi.org/Orange_Pi_PC#Mainline_kernel

Note that for HDMI support, some extra patching is needed still (as per dri-devel). Analog audio is not supported by mainline kernels yet.