Installing OpenBSD on Orange Pi

The Orange Pi are a series of embedded computer boards, similar to the Raspberry Pi. They are cheaper and are available in a number of variants. As of OpenBSD 6.2 the H3 based boards are supported. Sort of.

First you need to get the serial console working. It's 3.3v so you'll need a 3.3v to RS232 converter or a USB serial adapter that does 3.3v TTL. The console is 115200 8 N 1.

I've used TTL to RS232 adapters powered from the Orange Pi 3.3v on the IO connector. This worked in most cases, although one adapter was prone to passing gibberish from time to time. I think it was a 5v only adapter and was barely working on 3.3v. Others I've used worked fine.

The USB to TTL serial adapters I've tried all worked with three connections to the debug serial connector.

Download the OpenBSD armv7 install files from http://ftp/openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/6.3/armv7 or one of the mirrors.

You also need some packages with support files:

Package	Description
u-boot-aarch64-2018.03p0	U-Boot firmware for arm64
u-boot-arm-2018.03p0	U-Boot firmware for arm
dtb-4.16rc5	Device Tree Blobs for everything

As per the instructions in INSTALL.armv7 and hints from the internet, make a copy of a suitable miniroot, modify it in accordance with INSTALL.armv7, and write it to an SD card. For the Orange Pi One I did the following.

cp miniroot-cubie-63.fs miniroot-orangepi-one-63.fs
doas vnconfig vnd0 miniroot-orangepi-one-63.fs
doas mount /dev/vnd0i /mnt
doas cp /usr/local/share/dtb/arm/sun8i-h3-orangepi-one.dtb /mnt
doas rm /mnt/sun7i-a20-cubieboard2.dtb
doas umount /mnt
doas dd if=/usr/local/share/u-boot/orangepi_one/u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin of=/dev/vnd0c bs=1024 seek=8
doas dd if=miniroot-orangepi-one-63.fs of=/dev/rsd0c

This should get you a bootable SD card that starts the installer. Install as normal.

There appears to be a bug in the 6.3 install. After the install, if you power off and restart the Orange Pi won't boot because the device tree isn't set up. Take the SD card and copy the dtb to the MSDOS partion as was done when setting up the install filesystem. e.g.

doas mount /dev/sd0i /mnt
doas cp /usr/local/share/dtb/arm/sun8i-h3-orangepi-one.dtb /mnt
doas umount /mnt

Pop that SD card back into the Orange Pi and it should now boot.

USB works, but not the video/HDMI out. I've used USB disk with no problems, and USB network adapters. All the USB serial adapters I've tried have not been recognised.

I have used this to set up an Orange Pi One, an Orange Pi Zero, and an Orange Pi PC.

Philip Plane philip@xinqu.net