Bootable 64-bit RPi3/Pi4 Gentoo image (OpenRC/Xfce/VC4) Pt 2

[Goverp]

Sakaki,

Whee! Thanks so much - I've been putting off going 64-bit on my Pi4; now I've run out of excuses.
_________________
Greybeard

[spork_kitty]

[Sakaki]

spork_kitty,

if you have updated fully, your kernel will have been updated, to 4.19.66...

In which case, your old /lib/modules/4.19.48... directory will no longer exist. Reboot, and then try the modprobe again.
_________________
Regards,

sakaki

[Sakaki]

[NeddySeagoon]

Sakaki,

Thank you. There is lots of food for thought there.

I don't really want to turn off UAS as I want trim to work.
There are several things to look at, the first being a firmware update so my USB3 to SATA3 cable actually supports trim. :)

A power issue would not surprise me as I'm using the PoE HAT, which is only good for 2.5A at 5v.
I can probably test briefly with a powered hub, then butcher two USB3 extension cables to make a Y cable, if that's the fix.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[Sakaki]

For those who prefer that install route, the v1.5.0 RPi4B/3B+/3B-compatible gentoo-on-rpi-64bit image is now also available for install through PINN (called gentoo64 - and, for the PiTop v1 variant, gentoo64pt - there).
_________________
Regards,

sakaki

[spork_kitty]

[Kashire]

I slimmed it down, as per https://github.com/sakaki-/gentoo-on-rpi-64bit/wiki/Create-a-Slimmed-Down-Version-of-the-Image
I'd like to point out that something weird happened with the audio. I switched over to alsa exclusively, so if someone does this
and still wants sound but pulseaudio isn't working... you're going to watch to switch to alsa. It works out of the box just fine.

I went to the .config file and added in "-pulseaudio", updated world, and it worked out. Just a heads up if anyone runs into this problem.
The USB audio worked. It was the 3.5mm jack that was the issue. I almost bugged you all about it, but wanted to try that first..and it worked.

Thanks again, Sakaki-. Because of you, I'm fully switched over to a rpi4 desktop. Here's what it looks like at the moment,
if anyone is curious: https://0x0.st/zWRk.png It works for literally everything I've thrown at it for my needs, from college work
to making latex documents to watching 1080p videos. The compile time is pretty smooth, the only thing that actually sucked
was qtwebengine, but that's because it requires -j1 -l1 apparently. (It took three whole days!)

Cheers!

[Sakaki]

[spork_kitty]

[Sakaki]

spork_kitty,

depending on your target, you could remove some of the start*.elf files, the System*.map files and unused entries in overlays/.

However, I don't recommend that - it's only a short term fix as these files will get reinstalled when the relevant underlying packages upgrade (and eventually, you will run out of space). Unfortunately, when I put together the v1.0.0 gentoo-on-rpi3-64bit image way back in Jan 2017, I used a 63MiB bootfs as that was what Raspbian used back then. Turns out that was a mistake / hostage to fortune, and I should have chosen a larger partition (to provide room for the dual kernels of an RPi3/4 image, etc. in the future) Apologies ><

As such, I recommend to grow the boot partition and filesystem to 255MiB when upgrading to v1.5.0, shrinking (and moving forward) the root partition and filesystem to create the necessary space. (The v1.5.0 downloadable image ships with this resize already done.)

The gparted tool provides a nice GUI-driven way to achieve the above changes.
_________________
Regards,

sakaki

[spork_kitty]

[Sakaki]

Hello,

I've just posted a v1.5.1 bugfix release of my bootable 64-bit Gentoo image for the RPi4 B / RPi3 B & B+ on GitHub (here, includes full download instructions).

As always, you can burn the image (~1,720MiB compressed) to a microSD card (>=16GB), then boot your RPi3 or RPi4 from it directly (the root partition will be automatically resized to fill the card on first boot). Full instructions for download and use are provided on the project's GitHub page.

For details of the major changes - including RPi4 support - introduced in 1.5.0, please see my earlier post.

A changelog from the prior release image (with upgrade instructions) may be viewed here, but in summary:

• Fixed a pulseaudio problem that was causing glitchy audio playback on some systems (by setting tsched=0 in /etc/pulse/default.pa; credit: Darksky). Thanks to Gazzy for reporting.
  
• Reversed a change to the default /boot/config.txt that was causing monitor autodetection problems for some users (hdmi_drive=2 was uncommented in v1.5.0, my fault ><). Thanks to Gavinmc42 for reporting / testing the fix.
  
• Upgraded the shipped kernels, to bcm{rpi3,2711}-kernel-bis-bin-4.19.67.20190827, and boot firmware, to sys-boot/rpi3-64bit-firmware-1.20190819 (which inter alia should hopefully also solve a number of HDMI issues; thanks to derders and MamiyaOtaru for reporting). The shipped RPi4 kernel contains a PR which fixes a rather serious under-load WiFi problem for >1GiB systems (thanks to jfikar for reporting / testing, and also to pY4x3g for testing).
  
• Changed the pyconfig_gen WiFi regulatory domain setup code, so that it also sets cfg80211 ieee80211_regdom via an entry in /etc/modprobe.d/ (the original iw reg set approach is retained also, but it is reportedly not sufficient in all locales). Thanks to Gazzy for suggesting. The combination of this fix and updated kernel should hopefully address the WiFi connection problems that some have reported on the RPi4 (thanks to roylongbottom for providing diagnostic information on this, and to Mrsell for testing).
  
• Fixed an (unrelated) bug in pyconfig_gen, which prevents it starting up if the framebuffer display driver was specified (by omission of an vc4-{f,}kms-v3d entry in /boot/config.txt).
  
• Improved the build settings for dev-lang/python, by adopting the Debian approach of using -O3 and turning on profile-guided optimisation. This should significantly improve performance of e.g. emerge. For more details, please see this post. Thanks to ejolson for drawing the relatively poor Python performance on the v1.5.0 image to my attention, and to InBetweenNames for the pgo-enabled ebuilds.
  
• Added python3_7 to PYTHON_TARGETS, and unmasked for arm64. Following upstream, retained python:3.6 as the default interpreter for now (although you can easily change this if you wish, via eselect python list / sudo eselect python set <...>).
  
• Various minor ebuild tidy-ups (including the addition of USE-flag control for a number of RPi-specific patches e.g. rpi-v3d to media-libs/mesa etc.).
  
• Split out the core USE-controlled package group in rpi-64bit-meta, into the new innercore and a now-reduced core. This is to allow a minimal image to be more easily specified.
  
• All packages brought up-to-date against the Gentoo tree, as of 24 August 2019.

Users already on the prior 1.5.0 or earlier release can upgrade manually by following the instructions given here.


Pi-Top Image EOL; CLI-Only 'Lite' Image Added

Unfortunately, I have had to drop support for the Pi-Top specific image as of this v1.5.1 release. My Pi-Top v1's hub has recently suffered a hardware failure, leaving me unable to charge the internal battery, or boot an RPi3 in its chassis. As such, I am unable to test this variant of the image going forward - and I am not comfortable releasing images I haven't tested myself. You should still be able to bring up the Pi-Top specific drivers by setting the pitop USE flag globally, and then re-emerging rpi-64bit-meta however. My apologies for the inconvenience to users on this platform ><

On a happier note, as of v1.5.1, a 'lite' 64-bit Gentoo image is also provided (as requested here). This contains only the innercore (see above) package set and @system set plus deps, and boots to a CLI. No desktop environment is provided by default, nor are any of the heavyweight applications (Chromium etc.) bundled. It may be installed to any microSD card marked as >= 8GB. The same dual (-bis) kernels and Pi-specific startup services as the main image are used.

Note that for ease of binhost maintenance, this image still derives from the custom (desktop) profile as the 'full-fat' version, and as such contains quite a few more packages than a truly minimal stage 4 would do. But hopefully it should still be a useful starting point for those who want to e.g. build up a headless server. Feedback welcome.


Miscellaneous Hints

Updated EEPROM Firmware
If you are using a Pi4, don't forget to update your EEPROM firmware; there's an official fix released (version 0137a8) that will allow your system to use ~300mW less power. For more information, please see here.

Pimoroni Fan SHIM
If you are using the Pimoroni Fan SHIM with your RPi4, note that you can easily have it turn on and off in a temperature-controlled manner. To do so, simply add the following to /boot/config.txt:

[Sakaki]

The v1.5.1 full and lite images are now also available for downloading via PINN (called gentoo64 and gentoo64lite there; the latter may be found under the 'Minimal' tab in PINN's GUI).

I've also published the script I use to prepare my images for hosting on PINN, here, in case that is of interest to anyone.

Also, a new EEPROM firmware update for the RPi4, promising better powersaving, has been made available for testing today (0137ab); details here.
_________________
Regards,

sakaki

[axl]

I think you can throw this one in the bin.

But it's so cool to just read a thread by sakaki. BTW, because of google & facebook i've also identified you on facebook. I don't know why it happened, but I was like: hey... is the professor sakaki. hmmm... what do you know. it was in my suggested friends. i can't help it. And no, I didn't bother you on facebook.

long time listener, first time commenter. thank you for all your work. i remember the first noobs, and now it's just cool sakaki announcing new pinn release. 9000 cool.

I'm sorry.

[Sakaki]

axl,

the good professor would have been rather surprised to hear from you, as I've never been on Facebook, so just as well you didn't post, lol

But thanks for the nice feedback anyway ^-^
_________________
Regards,

sakaki

[axl]

George Varghese. is that not you?

[axl]

if i'm right, google or facebook or a combination of the two are making your identity public. i don't know how I ran into that profile. I still hope I'm wrong and that's not you professor.

(a bit of x-men).

[Sakaki]

Definitely not me!
Wrong gender, ethnicity, age and current locale, but otherwise a perfect match... ^-^
_________________
Regards,

sakaki

[axl]

Can we delete my previous question pls? It's stupid and it's just poisoning the thread for outside people. I'm sorry I had such a curiosity to begin with.


ANYWAY. New question. I'm pretty sure I know the answer to this already, but I would feel much better if the answer came out of someone else's mouth.

My assumption is that without USE=mmal (not available in 64 bits/aarch64), or sometime(s) marked as USE=raspberry-pi (also not available in 64 bits), there's no hardware accelerated video decoding.

Therefor... whatever you do, in 64 bits, you will not be able to make kodi work right. nor build omxplayer at all. ATM. At This Moment.

Anyone care to confirm this?

[ozbird]

Thank you very much NeddySeagoon and Sakaki - and others - for making 64-bit Gentoo Linux on Raspberry Pi 4 a thing.

I used Sakaki's bootable "Lite" image to get into a 64-bit environment on the Pi 4, then "emerge -e world" (ish...)

https://miro.medium.com/max/455/1*snTXFElFuQLSFDnvZKJ6IA.png



* it still works(?)

[Sakaki]

[n1ese]

Sakaki, good day,

Using your Lite image, would it be overly difficult, other than time consuming, for one to build X11 with the VC4 driver? I don't want a complete desktop environment just an old school, lightweight, window manager. I have no need for LibreOffice or many of the other apps you include with your full image as well.

Thanks

[NeddySeagoon]

n1ese,

You can put your Gentoo together as lite as you like if you do it yourself.
You can still use Sakakis binhost to avoid long compile times. Or even my binhost

When you go the DIY route, you may find that the USE flags you want don't match those on the binhosts.
Then you change your USE flags or build your own.

There is a middle of the road way too. Take a working install. Look at /var/lib/portage/world, don't edit it, just look.

[Sakaki]