Dear everyone,

Some feedback on running the Raspberry Pi 5. Thanks so much for porting OBSD to
it.

It's running as a router with the uplink on the RJ45 port and then a USB to RJ45
 adapter on one of the USB3 ports to a downstream access point that connects my
wireless devices.

No further issues apart from what I mentioned below, eg. what seems to be a 
kernel crash. The one time it happened when I was connected to the uart I could 
see the message in the email below: 
halt -ppanic: uvm_fault failed: ffffff80008aac4c esr

I have hit a few further crashes, though I'm not attached to it so cannot
 be certain of the error message. I am assuming it's the same sort of error as 
it
 often seems to happen when there's heavy network IO. First time it happened was
 on a Cloudflare speed test and at least half of the other times (I crash 
perhaps 1x every 1-2 weeks) that is during updates of my downstream devices.

Because these are kernel crashes, I have nothing in the logs and power cycle it
to bring it back online. I'm still on OpenBSD 7.8, not using the snapshots.

Hope that helps!

Thomas

On Tue, 4 Nov 2025, at 13:26, Nenhum_de_Nos wrote:
> November 4, 2025 at 6:56 AM, "Thomas" <[email protected] 
> mailto:[email protected]?to=%22Thomas%22%20%3Cexnihilo%40fastmail.org%3E 
> > wrote:
>
>> 
>> > 
>> > > 
>> > > what firmware  are you using? I still use the old EDK2 on external USB 
>> > >  drive. That way I cannot boot OpenBSD, HDMI works but it won't pass the 
>> > >  root device: step.
>> > > 
>> >  I think that it was stalling around that step too. Then I booted with 
>> >  bwfm disab
>> >  led. I did not try this several times, so maybe it was just a fluke, I 
>> >  dont know.
>> >  I performed all my installs with miniroot78.img dded onto the SD card 
>> >  and with
>> >  out using other storage.
>> > 
>> Actually this seems to have been coincidental.
>> 
>> Today a boot also hung around mounting the root filesystem. My guess is that 
>> it
>> may be due to a soft reboot and the sd card (I use a RPI branded card).
>> 
>> Powering off with halt -p, removing the power cable and booting up got me 
>> back
>> in today. I also have issues with an Ethernet USB adapter from time to time 
>> if
>> I don't fully disconnect power.
>> 
>> Another possible issue is the RX line floating on the UART headers. I was
>> booting with the probe attached and the boot was hanging. Plugging in the USB
>> cable (I had left the debug probe attached), the boot was stuck at the U-boot
>> prompt. Booting with the USB cable plugged in worked without issues. This
>> matches the behaviour described here:
>> https://marc.info/?l=u-boot&m=173504859119377
>> 
>> setenv bootdelay -2
>> saveenv
>> 
>> At the U-boot prompt does fix it for me and I can finally boot un-tethered to
>> my laptop. That command will mean that U-boot will never wait / abort boot 
>> and
>> reverting would need to mount the FAT partition and change uboot.env
>> 
>> Hope this helps with 7.8 on RPI5. So in short my current (working) setup:
>> - disabled bwfm in the kernel config
>> - bootdelay -2 for U-boot
>> - when rebooting, powering off, unplug cable, then plug it back
>> 
>> It's been running as a happy router since yesterday now. I just hit a page
>> fault under heavy network io:
>> halt -ppanic: uvm_fault failed: ffffff80008aac4c esr
>> 
>> But that did not occur again.
>> 
> Last night I tried the "disabled bwfm in the kernel config" trick, but 
> just after issuing "boot -c" it hangs just as a normal boot on mounting 
> root. I guess I will have to wait for the serial cable :(
>
> Using EDK2 I can run it over HDMI so far, just won't boot :)
>
> Patience is the key now, I guess.
>
> Thanks,
>
> matheus
>
> ------------
> "We will call you Cygnus,
> The God of balance you shall be."

Reply via email to