Gentoo 64 now on Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

[jlpoole]

I have a 64-bit Gentoo Linux running on a Raspberry Pi 2 W - a $15 board. My interest in this board is that it hopefully can serve streams (currently planning to use gstreamer's rtsp server) from a camera and provide a reliable video surveillance system. I'll make a plug for the excellent video recorder project: Moonfire-nvr which would collect, cache and serve up video streams for viewers and/or artificial intelligence analysis.

GenPi64 /home/demouser # uname -a
Linux GenPi64 5.10.92-v8 #1 SMP PREEMPT Thu Mar 10 09:38:22 UTC 2022 aarch64 GNU/Linux
GenPi64 /home/demouser #

This was made possible by the kind folks at the GenPi64 project.

To get to this point, I downloaded the following image

Raspberry Pi 4B, 3B/B+ 64-bit Lite alpha9 genpi64-arm64-openrc-lite-alpha9.img.zst

and loaded same on a Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB) and then performed an emerge update which took about 10 hours. The project is in need for manpower to help get their Jenkins packager up to snuff and when Jenkins is working (by automatically building images on scheduled events such as updates, or daily), then there will not be the out-of-sync package issue which caused me to have to upgrade for 10 hours. Once I had the high watermark of the Gentoo packages installed, I powered down the Raspberry Pi 4 and I removed the SD HC (Sand Disk 64 GB) and popped the disk into a Pi Zero 2 W and was welcomed with the traditional Gentoo status lines and a log-in prompt.

Hurrah for the GenPi64 project project!

And 3 cheers for Gentoo!

[jlpoole]

I successfully built my own image. But, it took 8 days and nights (1 more than the 7 days to create the Earth) of compiling in a VM on an AMD Bullseye 8120 CPU with 8 CPUS available and 16GB or ram. I did not employ a cross-compiler, so it was all being handled in QEMU. I also had to load two kernel modules: loop and btrfs.

Now I'm building some cross compilers and when those are ready, I will see what it takes to build, again.

But Gentoo on a $15 computer?? Where the diskette costs about 50% of the computer?? I'd say this is a milestone.

edit 3/24/22: to 8120 from 8150

[gtwrek]

What was your VM setup like?

I gave up on setting up a VM for any of the Pi's and just relied on Distcc/cross compiles. I didn't think there was a great VM setup for the PI that modeled the GPU/cpu interactions well.

(To be fair I'm a rookie at setting up VMs, so this could be all on me...)

[jlpoole]

What was your VM setup like?

I gave up on setting up a VM for any of the Pi's and just relied on Distcc/cross compiles. I didn't think there was a great VM setup for the PI that modeled the GPU/cpu interactions well.

(To be fair I'm a rookie at setting up VMs, so this could be all on me...)

The then-current kernel:

Code: Select all

Linux hermes 5.15.11-gentoo-x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Jan 16 09:24:16 -00 2022 x86_64 AMD FX(tm)-8120 Eight-Core Processor AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux

Here's my configuration for the VM where I built the project:

Code: Select all

hermes /etc/xen # cat gentoo2.conf
#
# 3/10/2022 jlpoole: dervied from gentoo1.conf
# based on https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Xen#Networking_on_domains
#
kernel = "/boot/vmlinuz-5.15.11-gentoo-x86_64"
ramdisk = "/boot/initramfs-5.15.11-gentoo-x86_64.img"
bootargs = "dolvm"
#bootargs = "root=/dev/sda3"
#
# 3/13/22 jlpoole: cmake failed, bumping up reserves
#
#memory = 2048
#vcpus  = 2
memory = 16384
vcpus  = 8
name   = "gentoo2"
disk   = ['phy:/dev/mapper/vg0-gentoo2,xvda3,w'] # Map the disk image to the virtual /dev/sda3
root   = "/dev/xvda3 ro lvm"
#vif    = ['bridge=br0'] # set the bridge name to br0 (see later), otherwise xen will use xenbr0

#
#  Hermes has 00:16:3e:11:12:XX
# ...11:12:01 = gentoo1 = Production = 192.168.XX.XX (pfSense)
#
vif = ['mac=00:16:3e:11:12:02,bridge=xenbr0']

hermes /etc/xen #

Caveat: be aware that LVM is not 100% reliable and can make booting into a kernel a tricky endeavor, I've run into problems with it and found the managers of the project non-responsive. Still, what it can accomplish outweighs, for now, the risks or pitfalls.