I will upload a disk image as soon as I have worked out a few things.
I have built app-misc/neofetch, sys-process/htop, sys-process/btop, net-misc/chrony, app-misc/cmatrixsys-apps/pciutils and sys-apps/usbutils successfully (and all accompanying libraries) on the board, even though it took weeks…
chronyd is able to successfully sync the clock from an NTP server when started as an openrc service on boot
dhcpcd is able to function as expected (mostly…), however because currently only one core is available to the kernel, everything else comes to a complete stop and the entire chip becomes unresponsive until dhcpcd has completed acquiring its lease.
With all this said, this board seems to only really be good for one thing at a time, but I can definitely see good use cases for what I am doing.
Wishlist:
gcc needs to be able to compile successfully without a kernel panic
At the moment it panics at checking for inflate in -lz... in most builds
This is unfortunate because I am yet to build distcc successfully, which I so desperately need…
It runs out of memory and/or hangs whenever -pipe or any O optimisations are put into the MAKEOPTS
Slowly working through fine-tuning these…
I’m looking for a way to force it to use swap over RAM, especially for compiling/linking
Still working on U-Boot without a FIT image, similar to other SBCs
Would allow for hotswapping kernel, initramfs (although a very tiny one), GRUB, and better kernel debugging
If anyone has already achieved these, please let me know. I’d love to incorporate it into the image for maximum flexibility.
I will also need to figure out how to make the image as small as possible. Gentoo isn’t exactly designed for this type of distributing, and 64GB is ridiculously gigantic for a disk image…
12G swap partition was added to the SD card, because 64MB of RAM was nowhere near enough to run emerge
I’ve been made aware of the consequences of adding a swap partition to an SD card, but this is wild. Are you able to hear your SD card degrading if you put your ear to it?
Jokes aside, this is super cool and I thoroughly enjoy making tech do things that it shouldn’t do (refer here).
Hahaha. I honestly haven’t tried yet. But I have had to opt for the most durable SD cards
Yes, another (probably more viable) option would be to have a swap partition running in RAM on a network server, and share that as a network block device, but I just wanted something quick and dirty.
Another update. libtool needs a bit of work, as ld seems to cause kernel panics (presumably because it runs out of memory very quickly…)
Swap on the SD card is faster, but the wear and tear on the card is quite noticeable. NFS depends on your network and whatever is hosting the swap for you.
Either way, bring a sandwich and a good book to read. You’ll be there a while…
)
