UPDATE regarding debug pins: they work, both for u-Boot and Linux consoles, as revisited with a new serial-to-USB CP2102 dongle. Apparently my (very) old FTDI dongle does not (worked with loopback connection though; maybe I got the D-Sub9 pinout wrong, or there is more to it than having an electrical link nowadays?..)
Jim On Thu, Apr 30, 2026 at 1:49 PM Jim Klimov <[email protected]> wrote: > ...And we have a bit of new development in this area -- thanks to > contributions collected on https://opencollective.com/networkupstools/ in > the recent past, a new SBC was acquired to increase the diversity of the > NUT CI farm: an Orange Pi RV2 with RISC-V (Ky X1) CPU and 8GB RAM for ample > build scratch area. So now we can confidently cover yet another CPU > architecture, at least for the sake of it. > > I fitted it with an additional NVMe, and first fired up the OrangePi > Ubuntu image, with manually added ZFS, but later migrated to their Debian > image (to try and install Proxmox) in another rootfs which went as easy as > populating that dataset, changing a line in `/boot/orangepiEnv.txt` and > rebooting. I am positively impressed about how well integrated recent > distros are with the tech I like (not that the ride wasn't without its > bumps and didn't take a couple of days of experiments to figure out the > puzzle) :) > > Despite 8 cores and NVMe, the SBC is moderately powerful (as expected from > reviews), taking about 15 minutes to configure, build and self-test NUT > (without PDF docs) from scratch without caches. A well-cached re-run of > that, however, is down to 6 minutes. > > Connection-wise, this SBC seems to be better equipped than a typical > Raspberry, with a couple of GbE ports, and WiFi, and BT, and two(!) > NVMe-capable M.2 slots as well as MicroSD/TF and eMMC (and SPI flash seen > as MTD block devices for u-Boot code and configuration), audio and RTC, > although the GPIO array is shorter (26 pins not 40). The SBC does not have > any cooling surfaces nor fans, and does not seem to require any (or have an > easy way to fit some); still there is quite a bit of internet lore about > retro-fitting Raspberry Pi coolers with straps, etc. Gonna get an adhesive > radiator for the CPU chip, maybe memory (that would block a second M.2 port > which is not now used) to err on the safe side. > > There are supposed to be UART debug pins, but I did not manage to make use > of them when troubleshooting my boot woes. Maybe the system and/or u-Boot > were looking out on GPIO UART pins instead, where my scrap-wire loops did > not fit safely. > > Hope this helps, > Jim Klimov > > > On Thu, Apr 23, 2026 at 5:19 PM Jim Klimov <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> Hello all, >> >> We have several VMs in the diverse NUT CI farm hosted by DigitalOcean, >> and they have renewed our yearly grant to run them. Sharing the news partly >> because of obligation, and mostly out of gratitude :) >> >> In other news, a colleague donated a NAS server they no longer need >> with significant RAM (so builds may not hit persistent storage) and 8 AMD >> cores, which (if all goes according to plan) should allow to clear some >> bottlenecks by adding native bare-metal/containerized builders for >> platforms that are not so fast in VMs and might fare better this way. If >> not, it would be another Proxmox node (and a backup storage target on disks >> that are still there). >> >> Jim Klimov >> >>
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