August 15, 2023
Disclaimer # OpenBSD does not support PinePhone Pro yet and there are real risks involved in running it on your PinePhone Pro now, as such, I do not recommand anyone to do that. You might fry your device due to unsupported power management IC and in a worse case the battery might catch fire due to unconfigured/untested charging safety features.
The purpose of this post is to document how to install OpenBSD on arm64 platforms not fully supported by OpenBSD, and much of this post is not PinePhone-specific, if you intend to follow what documented here, please be mindful about the risks and apply common sense.
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June 23, 2023
Basic Setup # All the tools we need for running VM are already packaged on Mobian, to install them, run:
sudo apt install virt-manager then add your user to the libvirt group:
sudo adduser mobian libvirt Reboot and then run virt-host-validate, it should indicate /dev/kvm exists and is accessible.
Trouble with Heterogeneous Architecture # Trying to start qemu-system-aarch64 with -enable-kvm flag can yield the following, rather unhelpfully worded error:
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June 15, 2023
It’s been a bit more than a week since I start daily driving the PinePhone Pro with Mobian, some parts of my journey are documented here.
IME and Keyboard # Both Phosh and Plasma provide their own work flow for setting up IME and adding extra language support, but so far I’m unable to get Phosh’s ibus-based input system to work with PinYin when using on-screen keyboard. I’m able to install PinYin and Anthy from Phosh’s software center, but those methods only work when used with external keyboard, switching to either of those from on-screen keyboard makes no difference when typing.
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June 6, 2023
Setup Tow-boot # Mobian as of now requires Tow-boot bootloader to be installed first, u-boot is no longer supported. To install Tow-boot, see this document, I find it easier to plug in a usb cable to start the phone while holding down the RE button. Be mindful that there will be no graphical boot menu after installation, at the moment tow-boot menu is only available via serial connection.
It’s also possible you can skip this step, according to the PinePhone Pro wiki:
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May 18, 2023
RetroBSD: a port of 2.11BSD Unix intended for embedded systems with fixed memory mapping.
https://github.com/RetroBSD/retrobsd/wiki This might be a good base to build on. DarkRiscV: a BSD-licensed RISC-V cpu core implemented in Verilog
https://github.com/darklife/darkriscv It implements most of the RISC-V RV32E and RV32I instruction set (missing csr*, e* and fence*) and works fine on many low cost FPGA system.
May 1, 2023
tweaks i apply after installing openbsd on a thinkpad for more comfortable operating