OpenBSD/arm64

OpenBSD arm64

OpenBSD/arm64 is a port of OpenBSD to various 64-bit ARM based systems.

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Current status

The current target platforms are Allwinner A64/H5, Amlogic G12A/B, AMD Opteron A1100, Ampere eMAG, Marvell ARMADA 7K/8K, Rockchip RK3328/RK3399, Broadcom BCM2837 (Raspberry Pi 3) and Socionext SCA11.

The install media includes firmware required to boot the Pine 64/64+ and Raspberry Pi.

The Raspberry Pi 3 requires closed but redistributable files on the system disk to load into the VC4 GPU which starts the ARM cores. By default the boot ROM will only try to load these files off an SD card. These files are present in the install media but there is no driver for SD/MMC yet so a USB disk drive and manual steps are required. To load the firmware off the SD card and have the root disk on USB after installing OpenBSD reboot and interrupt U-Boot before the timeout expires and instruct U-Boot to prefer USB over the SD card:

Hit any key to stop autoboot:  0
U-Boot> setenv boot_targets usb0 mmc0 pxe dhcp
U-Boot> saveenv
U-Boot> boot

Ampere eMAG and AMD Opteron systems come with a UEFI firmware in ROM and can boot off SATA or USB devices without board specific boot files on the system disk.

Most other machines load their firmware from the boot media and require additional steps to create bootable install media. See the OpenBSD/arm64 snapshot installation instructions for further details.

Supported hardware

OpenBSD/arm64 runs on the following hardware:

Allwinner A64/H5
- Pine64 Pine 64/64+
- NanoPi A64
- Orange Pi PC2
AMD Opteron A1100 (Seattle)
- AMD Seattle Development Board
- SoftIron OverDrive 1000
- SoftIron OverDrive 3000
Amlogic G12A/B
- Hardkernel ODROID-N2
Ampere eMAG
- Lenovo ThinkSystem HR330A
- Lenovo ThinkSystem HR350A
Broadcom BCM2837
- Raspberry Pi 3
Marvell ARMADA 7K/8K
- SolidRun/Marvell MACCHIATObin
Rockchip RK3328/RK3399
- Pine64 ROCK64
- Pine64 ROCKPro64
- Firefly-RK3399
- Theobroma Systems RK3399-Q7
Socionext SC2A11
- Socionext SynQuacer-E Developerbox

In general, other boards/machines that use one of the SoCs listed above will work as well, as long as UEFI firmware (e.g. U-Boot or EDK II firmware) is available. Both device trees and ACPI are supported. An updated device tree may have to be supplied to make OpenBSD usable.

Support for Amlogic G12A/B and Ampere eMAG was added after OpenBSD 6.5 was released.

Ethernet

dwge(4) integrated Synopsys DesignWare GMAC 10/100/Gigabit Ethernet on Rockchip RK3399
dwxe(4) integrated Allwinner EMAC 10/100/Gigabit Ethernet on Allwinner A64/H5
msk(4) integrated Marvell Yukon-2 10/100/Gigabit Ethernet on OverDrive 1000
smsc(4) integrated SMSC LAN95xx 10/100 USB Ethernet on Raspberry Pi 3

Storage

ahci(4) on AMD Opteron A1100, Ampere eMAG, Marvell 7K/8K and SynQuacer-E
dwmmc(4) on Rockchip RK3328/RK3399
sdhc(4) on Rockchip RK3399
sximmc(4) on Allwinner A64/H5

USB

dwctwo(4) on Raspberry Pi 3
ehci(4) on Allwinner A64/H5 and Rockchip RK3328/RK3399
xhci(4) on Amlogic G12A/B, Ampere eMAG, Rockchip RK3399, OverDrive 1000 and SynQuacer-E

No real time clock: Many of the arm64 devices do not have a battery-backed real time clock. For this reason, using the -s option of OpenNTPD may be desirable.

Getting and installing OpenBSD/arm64:

The latest supported OpenBSD/arm64 release is OpenBSD 6.5. Here are the OpenBSD/arm64 installation instructions.

Snapshots are made available from time to time, in this location as well as on a few mirrors. Here are the OpenBSD/arm64 snapshot installation instructions as well.