Recently I've been playing around with the Radxa ROCK 5B+. Turns out installing Gentoo on it is a rather involved process, especially if you want a bcachefs rootfs. For those of you wondering why on earth someone would want to do that: this post is not about the why, but about the how. I have my reasons.

The ROCK 5B+ supports loading U-Boot from its SPI NOR flash chip. However, that chip is empty when the board leaves the factory. It can also load U-Boot from a microSD card. So you could write Radxa OS to a microSD card, and continue from there, but I prefer using what I know. As I'm an OpenWrt developer, and I know that OpenWrt supports various Rockchip based boards, that's where I started. Checking the rockchip target in OpenWrt, I quickly learned it supports the ROCK 5B. Not the same board, but it's very similar. So let's build an OpenWrt image for the ROCK 5B, flash it to a microSD card, and see if it boots.

It does, but unfortunately I hit a bunch of problems along the way.

After running Frigate NVR with CPU inference for way too long, I decided it was finally time to start using an accelerator, and ordered a Google Coral USB Accelerator. When plugging in the device, it appeared in lsusb like this:

Bus 002 Device 003: ID 1a6e:089a Global Unichip Corp.

The Frigate docs mention that it needs to initialize the Coral USB first, before it can use it. Frigate will try to initialize the device, but doing so will change the USB ID. This is problematic if you are running Frigate in a VM, and need to passthrough the device using the USB ID. After initialization, the device appears like this in lsusb:

Bus 002 Device 004: ID 18d1:9302 Google Inc.

After moving my HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M477fdw from my Huawei S6720-32C-PWH-SI to a Ubiquiti Unifi Switch Flex running OpenWrt master, I noticed the printer randomly coming out of standby. Looking at the OpenWrt log, I noticed the DSA interface connected to the printer to be flapping.

Like many other people, I too started experiencing crashes since upgrading Thunderbird from 102 to 115. On my workstation and M2 MacBook Air, these crashes have become less frequent. However, on my old XPS13, which I'm still using because the Asahi kernel does not support DP-ALT mode on the M2 MacBook Air yet, Thunderbird would crash every time I tried to go to my companies' mailbox. Extremely annoying, and as it doesn't seem to produce core dumps, probably hard to debug.

Yesterday I picked up the Banana Pi BPI-F3 I ordered 2 weeks ago. It is joining the small army of RISC-V devices I already own:

• Espressif ESP32-C3 (20x)
• Espressif ESP32-C6 (20x)
• SiFive HiFive Unmatched
• StarFive VisionFive 2

After giving the Armbian Noble image a quick try and being unimpressed, I decided to try installing Gentoo on it. I'll be documenting the process here. The first step: compile U-Boot.