piCore on RPI Alternatives

[xuraax]

I have been waiting for the RPI Zero W to become available for purchase for some time now with no success.

Since i am fed up waiting I am looking at alternatives one of which being the Banana Pi BPI-M2. This seems very similar to the Zero W and it is reported that it has a more powerful processor which would however need a heatsink to take advantage of this.

Would I be able to drop Picore onto this board without too much hassle? I am by no means an expert at this.


Regards

xuraax

[bmarkus]

Do not know much about this Banana Pi, but for sure it can be done. You need a Kernel for the board with few options enabled or optimized like compressed ram disk, swap and to find out how to boot piCore.

[PDP-8]

Sounds like a great idea.  To get an o/s upon which to build your TC toolchain on, you may be interested in Armbian:

https://www.armbian.com/banana-pi-m2-plus/

That will get you up and running, and when TC is functional, report back!

When I had my Libre LePotato, I used Armbian for that.

[xuraax]

Thanks for the link.

Alas, I am not sufficiently conversant with the topic to enable me to build a TC toolchain. I would love to follow anybody who can.

Regards

[PDP-8]

Heh, you and me both.

I notice that Armbian now supports the RPI board, which they adamantly did NOT do in the past, since that was fully covered already, and focused on all the other boards instead.

If one is going to do this, note that they offer more than just the most obvious two links - there are "alternate" images (other download images) that may be more suited to the need, and also a "build framework" that the smart guys can dig into.

Who knows - could be an opportunity to more easily port PiCore to other boards using Armbian as the temporary host o/s for custom toolchains.

Heck, even dCore looks to be a good opportunity to possibly use / port from Armbian to get into ARM more easily...

Beyond me though, that's true DEV territory..

[gadget42]

not specifically dealing with your topic but perhaps informative anyway:

https://gwolf.org/2022/02/got-to-boot-a-rpi-zero-2-w-with-debian.html

sharing is caring

[CNK]

I've been planning to do this for a couple of years now. Unfortunately I'm not sure whether it might be a couple more years 'till I get to it. I've been planning to follow this guide when the time comes.

Note that SoCs vary a lot between different Banana Pi models. The M2 Zero uses the Allwinner H2+ which is a variant of the Allwinner H3. The architecture is ARMv7-A.

There are links to patched kernel sources on the Banana Pi wiki, up to v. 5.3.5. I haven't looked into the Armbian project myself.

[PDP-8]

We just need to donate some boards to bMarkus and give him a week's deadline to bootstrap piCore from Armbian.

That guide he wrote is pretty awesome:
http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,17895.0.html

I liked Armbian back when I was involved.  The closest though that I could get to a consistent interface with piCore and Armbian from a user standpoint was to use BusyBox as my shell and cli environment by putting busybox as the first thing in my path on the LePotato arm board.

Then I got entangled with small x86/x86_64 mini-pc's and TinyCorePure64 proper...

Oh yeah - like always, start Armbian with "root" and "1234" as the defaults:
https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Getting-Started/

Back in the day, Armbian, rather than the RPI project got me educated real fast on what micro-sd cards were *really* all about and what to look for and how to take care of them.

[vinceASPECT]

Hello Forum,

it is great that Armbian is supporting nearly all the Pi boards now.

https://www.armbian.com/rpi4b/

Thx
C.

[bmarkus]

Doesn't support older armv6 boards

[vinceASPECT]

oh i was thinking ZERO 2 W was armv6......but armv8 64

hmmm

C

[PDP-8]

Yeah, the point here was not to promote Armbian - as great as that small independent team is - but to suggest it as a possible convenient bootstrap for Tiny / piCore toolchains eventually on those other boards.

I'm surprised myself that they support the RPI, as originally years ago there was no need as it was already adequately covered by another team.

So my comments were just about providing a possible convenience to getting piCore / dCore up and running on all those other boards - rather than being a push of Armbian itself.