Slackware Aarch64: Raspberry Pi 400 hardware support
Slackware - ARMThis forum is for the discussion of Slackware ARM.
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I'm going to do another installation for more storage space. The first time, I used the only blank USB stick I had available, 32GB, which is 85% full.
This time I'm going to use a 60GB SSD with a USB3 to SATA cable.
No joy here! Are you running the stock kernel or the Pi fork?
I can get the stock kernel to load and run, but the Pi fork kernel won't even boot!
On the stock kernel, xfce and KDE will load, but both crash constantly. I'm convinced its to do with the graphics drivers being unable to cope with hi-res monitors. I need to try and move my Pi-400 to another room, where I can use a 1920x1080 rather than a 4K monitor. Easier said than done...
The failure of the Pi-fork kernel to boot has me absolutely stumped! There is no sign of life at all with it, so nothing to debug! I don't think its the kernel itself. I think its an issue with the u-boot system, which seems to be problematic with the Pi.
Using the slaarch64 packages on top of the SARPI kernel works perfectly, so its not a fundamental issue with kde or xfce. The stock kernel does not seem to support the graphics chips very well, and the Pi-kernel can't be booted! Neither SARPI nor slarm64 use u-boot, but I haven't figured out how to boot the Pi-fork without it. I can get it to boot initially without u-boot, but it stalls at the point where it appears to be switching from the framebuffer to the kernel driver. I suspect it isn't loading the initrd properly, but the only syntax I've located for this doesn't seem to work.
For the moment, I'm sticking with SARPI, which "just works"!
I'm using the stock kernel: 6.6.23. I haven't bothered trying the pi fork or SARPI kernels. I've stuck to Stuart Winter's release and installation instructions.
As I say, it sounds like the stock kernel is OK at lower resolutions. The Pi graphics chips are weird. The driver is proprietary so everyone is trying to work around them, with varying degrees of success. Even the official Pi OS can't play 4K videos, yet Librelec/Kodi play them flawlessly on the same hardware! Go figure!
Are you using X11 or Wayland? I'm using X11 on the 400, and everything else, because Wayland looks thin and washed out (best way I can put it). It doesn't crash though.
Ive tried both, and it doesn't seem to make much difference. One of the pieces of software that I use a lot doesn't play nicely with Wayland, so until the developers get that sorted, I'm inclined to stay with X11.
X11 is certainly noticeably livelier than Wayland on my X86_64 machines, but I see a lot of distributions (even for the Pi) are moving to Wayland. I suspect its only a question of time until Slackware drops X11....
Following on from Brian's experiences, I finally moved my Pi-400 into another room, where I had a 1920x1080 monitor. There's been some delay, because I had to get another HDMI cable and another power supply for the Pi, the ones I normally use being too much trouble to try and remove...! I've also had family visiting for the grand-kids half term which has caused inevitable delays!
Anyway, firing up the stock kernel on the lower resolution monitor got both KDE and XFCE performing flawlessly, just as Brian has found! Well, almost! WiFi doesn't work, which is a bit of a pain, but I've had that issue before, and its usually sorted by getting the firmware files from a Pi distribution. However, before bothering with that, I cloned the SD card, and installed the Pi-fork kernel, and blow me, it booted without any issues! Even the WiFi worked!
I used the OS-initrd-mgr to synchronise the initrd - something that has caused issues in the past, but no, it was fine! Several reboots, and I couldn't fault it!
Now for the acid test! Will it boot on the original 4K monitor? I carted it back to its usual home, plugged everything in, and bingo! It booted perfectly!
One thing I have now done is commented out the 4K@60Hz line in my config.txt, as my monitor can only do 4K at 30Hz anyway. Also, I initially booted it with the monitor plugged in to the secondary HDMI port on the Pi-400. When that worked, I switched it back to the normal port, and it still worked!
I am at something of a loss to explain all this! I think that the machine may have been booting fine all along on the Pi-fork kernel, but without seeing any output on either HDMI or the serial port, there was no way of knowing. I can only assume that when booted on the 1K monitor, it "learns" to use the frame buffer at that lower resolution, and stores it somewhere. At that stage its long before the kernel is booted, and is when things are being handled either by what passes for a BIOS or u-boot.
At any rate, it now seems to be working fine. The lesson seems to be: Boot it on a low res monitor first before committing to 4K!
The only thing I don't like about the RPi 400 is the keyboard, but that's hardware - nothing to do with Slackware. A nanosecond's sustained hold on a key leads to repeats. I had a few authentication failures through that. However, both XFCE and KDE have options to disable autorepeat, so that's sorted out.
Now I've got it working again - thanks to your experiences - I've been doing some more playing with the stock kernel. The Pi-fork one is now working perfectly at 4K, but the stock one has both KDE and XFCE borking at anything over 1920x1080.
Setting XFCE to 1080 was relatively easy, even with the missing menus, as a right click brought up settings from where I was able to set the display manually. KDE was trickier as trying to bring up System Settings caused it to crash instantly. I managed to get round this by logging out back to a command line and deleting anything that looked like a KDE setting in my home directory. This got KDE stable for long enough to get into System Settings and fix the display at 1920x1080.
That still didn't help with SDDM however. To fix that I had to add "xrandr -s 1920x1080" to /usr/share/sddm/scripts/Xsetup. I can now boot directly into runlevel 4, and let SDDM handle KDE, XFCE, Wayland, etc.
BTW, I also found that running the "os-initrd-mgr" with the -S setting broke Wifi. I managed to get it back by reinstalling the kernel. Also, it still doesn't fully shutdown. Running either "halt" or "shutdown -h now" stops the processor, but the GPU and any peripherals connected to the GPIO connector are still alive! Fn+F10 no longer does anything, and the only way to kill it or restart is to remove the power. The stock kernel has been like that forever....!
Still, its progress, and the Pi-fork is now running smoothly - and everything shuts down properly!
BTW, I also found that running the "os-initrd-mgr" with the -S setting broke Wifi.
Do this:
Code:
root@honey:/# cd /tmp ; mkdir B ; cd B
root@honey:/tmp/B# zcat /boot/initrd-armv8|cpio -di
root@honey:/tmp/B# ./tools/find_network-drivers
Is the module for wlan0 'brcmfmac' ?
Quote:
I managed to get it back by reinstalling the kernel. Also, it still doesn't fully shutdown. Running either "halt" or "shutdown -h now" stops the processor, but the GPU and any peripherals connected to the GPIO connector are still alive!
I think it works fine on the Raspberry Pi 4 with the mainline Kernel. Remember, RPi400 isn't supported - nobody uses it apart from you and Brian ;-)
root@honey:/# cd /tmp ; mkdir B ; cd B
root@honey:/tmp/B# zcat /boot/initrd-armv8|cpio -di
root@honey:/tmp/B# ./tools/find_network-drivers
Is the module for wlan0 'brcmfmac' ?
OK, done that and yes.
Code:
wlan0 [XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX]: brcmfmac (up)
After running "os-initrd-mgr -S", there is no wlan0 entry at all
And yes, I appreciate that Brian and I are very much in a minority! Perhaps were the only ones stubborn (dumb?) enough to persevere with it!
Bearing in mind how many of these there are out there, it seems a shame to disenfranchise so many potential slackers. BTW, did you get my PM where I went into a bit more detail of exactly what I did?
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& fingers crossed.
