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

[Sakaki]

Hello,

I've just posted a v1.4.2 update release of my bootable 64-bit Gentoo image for the RPi3 (model B and B+) on GitHub (here, includes full download instructions).

This release sees a number of significant version bumps to the bundled packages (wrt v1.4.1): for example, GCC from v8 to v9, Clang from v7 to v8, Chromium from v72 to v74, Firefox Quantum from v65 to v67 etc.

Update 25 June 2020: a new v1.6.0 release of the image is available (RPi4 supported, kernel 5.4!); please see this post for more details.

A screenshot of the image running on an RPi3B+ may be viewed here.

As always, you can burn the image (~1,511MiB compressed) to a microSD card (>=16GB), then boot your RPi3 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.

The image contains a complete (OpenRC-based) Gentoo system (including a full Portage tree, up-to-date as of 12 June 2019) - so you can run emerge operations immediately - and has a reasonably populated userland (see the screenshot referred to above; all the apps shown, and many others, are bundled), so that you can get productive without having to compile or configure anything first (unless you want to, of course ^-^). Just download, xzcat to a microSD card (or use Etcher), and boot!

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

• Kernel updated, to sys-kernel/bcmrpi3-kernel-bis-bin-4.19.49.20190611. Fixes some Bluetooth issues experienced with the prior 4.19 kernel, and adds POE fan and (built-in) btrfs support. Support for the RPi camera module (and leverage of the hw video codecs via v4l2) is retained.
  
• Per email request from @iugamarian, added the following applications to the image:
  • media-video/mpv;
    
  • net-p2p/transmission;
    
  • sys-fs/ncdu; and
    
  • app-misc/mc.
• Various minor ebuild tidy-ups.
  
• All packages brought up-to-date against the Gentoo tree, as of UTC EOD 12 June 2019 (which means e.g., www-client/firefox-67.0, www-client/chromium-74.0.3729.169-r1, app-office/libreoffice-6.2.4.2 etc. are bundled; a full list of installed packages may be found here).

As before, a variant image for the Pi-Top v1 (an RPi3-based DIY laptop) is also included. Manual upgrade instructions for users on older versions of the image are also provided, here.

Have fun ^-^

And, as always, any problems or comments, please post either in this thread, or in the project's thread on the Raspberry Pi forums (here).

PS: I aim to release the PINN variant of this v1.4.2 image in a week or so, real-world commitments permitting ^-^

Split from Bootable 64-bit RPi3 Gentoo image (OpenRC/Xfce/VC4) UPDATED and stuck in its place.
--NeddySeagoon

Unstuck 28-Feb-21 -- NeddySeagoon
_________________
Regards,

sakaki

[Sakaki]

For those who prefer that install route, the v1.4.2 gentoo-on-rpi3-64bit image is now also available for install through PINN (called gentoo64 - and, for the PiTop v1 variant, gentoo64pt - there).

PS the new Pi4 has been officially announced today, so I guess we have another porting target for Gentoo now ^-^
_________________
Regards,

sakaki

[NeddySeagoon]

Sakaki,

I've just ordered the 4G version. :)
Thank you for the tip off. It won't ship until July 5 though.

-- edit 25 June --

My supplier set low expectations then exceeded them. Its in the post already :)
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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

[paluszak]

My Raspberry Pi 4 is on the way, so I hope we'll get an image as well. With USB3, 4G RAM and a faster Ethernet it could have a zillion new uses, like NAS or ceph node.

[Sakaki]

[orion777]

Good day, Sakaki et.all!
Starting from some releases, the WiFi module remains continuously enabled. The command ifconfig wlan0 down can remove it from the list of active connections (till reboot), but the indicator still is blinking; as well as after the reboot it again appears in the list of interfaces.

Since I would like to reduce the interference in 2.4GHz band, as well to reduce the power consumption too, does there any ways how to disable this interface and prevent it to bring up automatically after reboot?

[antonlacon]

[orion777]

[NeddySeagoon]

orion777,

Try the rfkill command. That should turn off the WiFi transmitter.
It can control WiFi and Bluetooth separately.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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

[antonlacon]

[janbielanski]

Hello, I am using your RPI3 ARM64 image and I wanted to configure hostapd but I got failed. I don't know what I did wrong (on Raspbian I don't have any problems but I don' t want Raspbian because I want to learn ARM64 bit architecture and AArch64 assembler). I posted my problem here: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1099624-highlight-.html

[Sakaki]

Hi janbielanski,

please see my reply in your thread quoted above.
_________________
Regards,

sakaki

[orion777]

Good evening!

[janbielanski]

[janbielanski]

Hello
When I run genup i could not update media-gfx/fotoxx:

[Sakaki]

[Sakaki]

Migration of rpi3 Overlay Name to genpi64

The following is taken from a news item that affected users should have received - but I copy it below for reference in case today's migration has badly broken anyone's system.

Hello,

In light of the forthcoming (image in soft freeze now) Pi4 support, I have decided to rename the main ebuild repo used by the image, from rpi3-overlay (repo name "rpi3" [1]) to genpi64-overlay (repo name "genpi64"). The custom profile name has also been changed (from default/linux/arm64/17.0/desktop/rpi3 to default/linux/arm64/17.0/desktop/genpi64).

Migration

Along with today's commits migrating the repository name, you will also have received a 'fixup' script, which will correct your /etc/portage/repos.conf entry, and also change the repo name in entries in the /var/db/pkg/... database. The script may be viewed here.

(The GitHub URI for the overlay project has also changed, from [2] to [3], but as they automatically redirect moved project links, your old URI should still refer, while the migration is happening.)

This fixup script will be run automatically, within a week at most, by a cron.weekly service already installed on your RPi. However, if you wish to correct the repo name immediately (or you have the weekly fixup service disabled), then simply issue the following commands on your RPi (if running as demouser, prefix them with sudo):

[spork_kitty]

A quick note: the /etc/cron.weekly script is only present if dev-embedded/rpi3-64bit-meta is built with 'weekly-genup' set in USE (which installs app-portage/weekly-genup). To be fair, that's the default, but when I attempted to run it on my Pi, it was not present. Running the script straight from [4] (after syncing) did the trick, though.

--

Are there any plans to add nftables support? I checked out /boot/config and saw something about XTABLES. None of the family support appears to be there, either.

If that file is incorrect, my apologies. I didn't see /proc/config.gz either, to check what the running kernel is using. Which package do you build your kernels from? I can try building my own from it to enable nftables.

This image is awesome, btw. Easily the best distro that I've found to put on a Pi, even though compiling is a problem (until I have my desktop do compiling for it. )

[Sakaki]

[Sakaki]

Hello,

I've just posted a v1.5.0 release of my bootable 64-bit Gentoo image on GitHub (here, includes full download instructions).

This release marks a significant milestone for the project, as the RPi4 is now supported (in addition to the RPi3 model B and B+, which remain supported too).

Thanks to rapid upstream progress on aarch64 kernel work for the new board, there are surprisingly few compromises required when running the Pi4 under a 'pure' 64-bit OS such as this one. Specifically, for the Pi4 in this 1.5.0 release:

• V3D graphics acceleration is supported in X under vc4-fkms-v3d / Mesa;
  
• the full 4GiB complement of memory is usable (if you are lucky enough to own a top-of-the-line model, that is ^-^);
  
• the V4L2 M2M video codecs and optional plug-in camera module are both usable;
  
• use of dual HDMI displays is supported;
  
• Bluetooth, fast Ethernet, and dual-band WiFi work.

All software on the image (userland and kernel) has been ground-up recompiled using "march=armv8-a+crc -mtune=cortex-a72 -O2" CFLAGS, meaning it should be optimized for the out-of-order pipeline provided by the newer Pi4's Cortex-A72 SoC, while still retaining backwards compatibility with the older RPi3 B/B+'s Cortex-A53.

A screenshot of the image running on a dual-display RPi4 B may be viewed here.

As always, you can burn the image (~1,643MiB 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.

Since the image contains a complete (OpenRC-based) Gentoo system (including a full Portage tree, up-to-date as of 10 August 2019), you can run emerge operations immediately. But as it also comes with a reasonably populated userland (see the screenshot referred to above; all the apps shown, and many others, are bundled), you can get productive without having to compile or configure anything first (unless you want to, of course ^-^). Just download, xzcat to a microSD card (or use Etcher), and boot!

NB: as you may have noticed, the project's name on GitHub has changed, from gentoo-on-rpi3-64bit to gentoo-on-rpi-64bit, to reflect the fact that the RPi4 is now also supported. Thanks to the way GitHub does things, people trying to find the old project should be automagically redirected to the renamed version. My bad in choosing an over-limiting moniker first time ><

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

• Updated the RPi3 kernel (from the bcmrpi3-kernel-bis weekly autobuild) to version 4.19.66.20190816.
  
• Added an additional kernel (from the bcm2711-kernel-bis weekly autobuild). This second kernel is used when booting the RPi4, lives at /boot/kernel8-p4.img, and is a tweaked version, as the name suggests, of a completely separate configuration: bcm2711_defconfig, as opposed to bcmrpi3_defconfig. The two kernels have distinguished release names, and so separate subdirectories in /lib/modules, but as they are built together, they share a common kernel tree tip commit. The kernel version used in this release includes (on the bcm2711 build) the recently-upstreamed PR#3144 (which allows the full 4GiB of RAM to be used, where present) and PR#3063 (which enables the use of V3D acceleration on the Pi4). The two kernels have auto-generated ebuilds by which they are installed: sys-kernel/bcmrpi3-kernel-bis-bin and sys-kernel/bcm2711-kernel-bis-bin, respectively.
  
• Boot firmware updated to sys-boot/rpi3-64bit-firmware-1.20190718, and userland libraries to media-libs/raspberrypi-userland-1.20190808 (for dual-monitor aware tvservice utility etc.)
  
• Size of the boot partition on the image expanded, from 63MiB to 255MiB, to accommodate the new dual-kernel setup just described (required for RPi3/4 booting).
  
• Added dev-lang/go (it's been the most frequently requested package), and (an arm64 Pi4 patched version of) dev-libs/pigpio (for easy control of GPIOs) to the core package set.
  
• Added sys-block/gparted (for disk management), net-misc/xorgxrdp and net-misc/tigervnc[server] (for remote access), media-sound/pavucontrol for pulseaudio (also made this a default USE flag), and x11-misc/arandr (for multi-screen layouts) to the xfce package set. (Also modified the arandr ebuild to add a login service that auto-loads layouts saved to ~/.screenlayout/default.sh).
  
• Added app-office/abiword to the apps set (a lighter alternative to libreoffice writer - which remains bundled too - that some may prefer).
  
• Included a slightly tweaked media-libs/mesa to allow v3d acceleration on the RPi4. Standard vc4 acceleration on the RPi3 is still supported.
  
• Updated the pyconfig_gen application (found at Settings -> RPi Config Tool): now supports configuring a second monitor (on the Pi4), and also setting the WiFi regulatory domain (RPi3/4). A simple overclocking "manettino" ^-^ for the Pi4 is also provided (all permitted settings should be warranty-safe, per RPF advice, but use at your own risk!).
  
• Updated the media-video/pi-ffcam "camera live view" applet to work with the Pi4 (found in the Multimedia menu).
  
• Also updated the media/video/pi-ffplay application for the Pi4 (again found in the Multimedia menu, this is a trivial app to illustrate accessing the Pi 3/4's hardware video codecs via v4l2m2m).
  
• Moved 6by9's patches to media-video/ffmpeg (upon which the two apps above rely) forward to version 4.1.4, as these don't seem to be upstream yet.
  
• Tidied up a number of boot-time services for RPi4 compatibility (e.g., x11-misc/rpi3-safecompositor etc.). Note that for simplicity I have not renamed these, so please don't disable or remove services just because their name starts with "rpi3-" (as for the most part, they still do something useful on an RPi4 too!).
  
• I did change the name of the main repo used by the image though, from "rpi3" to "genpi64", and migrated the custom profile too. You can read more about this here.
  
• Version bumped sys-boot/rpi3-boot-config, to update the baseline /boot/config.txt file for use with the Pi4 (while still retaining compatibility with the Pi3B/B+).
  
• Renamed the master meta-package, from rpi3-64bit-meta to rpi-64bit-meta.
  
• Added LLVM_TARGETS="WebAssembly BPF" (in addition to the default AArch64), to allow dev-lang/rust to be built with the wasm USE flag.
  
• Various minor ebuild tidy-ups.
  
• All packages brought up-to-date against the Gentoo tree, as of 10 August 2019 (which means e.g., www-client/firefox-68.0.1, www-client/chromium-76.0.3809.87-r1, app-office/libreoffice-6.3.0.4 etc. are bundled; a full list of installed packages may be found here).

A variant image for the Pi-Top v1 (an RPi3-based DIY laptop) is also included, as usual.
I also aim to provide PINN versions of both these images shortly, for those that prefer that installation route.

Have fun ^-^

And, as always, any problems or comments, please post either in this thread, or in the project's thread on the Raspberry Pi forums (here).

PS: Updated EEPROM Firmware

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

PPS: USB Shortcomings

As this release comes early in the lifecycle of the RPi4, expect to find a number of bugs and issues with it! In particular, one major issue, (due, as I understand it, per this post by 6by9, to a lack of FIQ fast interrupt handling on aarch64) is that isochronous transfers over USB are likely to be pretty bad in 64-bit compared to 32-bit. For example, USB webcams etc will drop frames (bulk transfers, as you might get e.g. when copying large files to and from a storage device, work fine on USB under 64-bit however; as do low-speed peripherals such as mice and keyboards).

Acknowledgement

Thanks to NeddySeagoon for maintaining his public bloodnoc.org armv8a binhost - I needed to do a full --emptytree @world rebuild as part of this image prep, which highlighted quite a few issues (packages that no longer built from source properly, but had tbz2s in my isshoni.org binhost and so didn't show up in regular @world updates) - having his tbz2's to check build settings against (qtbz2 and qxpak are your friends!) was a really useful resource!

Edited to add acknowledgement.
_________________
Regards,

sakaki

[NeddySeagoon]

Sakaki,

Check your Pi kernel for UAS support. The Pi4 USB3 can do it and its harmless to enable anyway.
Users with a suitable USB block storage device on the USB3 ports will get a speed improvement as bulk mode is no longer used, so you can have overlapping commands.
Further, UAS should bring support for trim/discard which will make SSD users happy.
My USB/SATA doda needs a Windows only firmware update to pass the trim command, so I've not tried it as I have not had Windows since 2002.

The Pi4 microSD supports trim too. Try

[Maitreya]

Again, Sakaki, great work and thank you!

Does the new release also include a fix for the green hue of v4l2m2m?

[Sakaki]

[NeddySeagoon]

Sakaki,

The Open Source VC4 driver works for me. Thank you.
I even get 3840x2160@30Hz, which came as a bit of a surprise as my display is not supposed to support 3840x2160 at all on HDMI inputs.

I had to revert the firmware change as dmesg filled up with

[Kashire]

Nice! Thank you Sakaki!

EDIT: I know this is a niche thing, but I am able to fully get qtwebengine + qutebrowser to compile after I edited the zswap to be 8192 MB. [edit /etc/conf.d/rpi3-expand-swap]