NetBSD/amiga installation guide

[karloch]

Hi Amiga fellows! Several years ago I discovered how current NetBSD versions run on the Amiga with a wide range of supported hardware that makes our computer feels like at home with a modern, current operating system.

While the AmigaOS is one of the biggest benefits of the Amiga computers, there are other operating systems available for our platform. At the time of writing these lines, current Linux kernel and NetBSD versions still -amazingly- work on the Amiga as long as you have a MMU enabled CPU and enough RAM.

Kudos to the team of people of the Linux/m68k, Debian/m68k and NetBSD/amiga community for their work keeping the Linux and NetBSD running on Amiga!

This post is about NetBSD/amiga.

What is NetBSD/amiga?

NetBSD/amiga is the port of NetBSD operating system to the Amiga line of personal computers by Commodore, Amiga International and to the DraCo by MacroSystem. It is a current, up to date UNIX family operating system with an high degree of compatibility with Amiga hardware, multitasking, multiuser and advanced networking features. It comes with a rich set of system utilities, compilers, X11R7 and even games.

In contrast with GNU/Linux, where we have a kernel and different distributions for the userspace, NetBSD developers covers both, the kernel and the userspace under a single distribution. Please, note this is not better or worse than the GNU/Linux approach, just different.

You can watch the following video captured from my Warp 1260 enabled Amiga 1200, running NetBSD.

[ Show youtube player ]

Minimum requirements

• 68020+68851, 68030, 68040 or 68060 CPU.
• ECS or AGA chipset. There is also support for a good amount of RTG cards, even a driver for ZZ9000 is being developed.
• 24 MB of FAST MEM; way more if you plan to run X.
• 250 MB of HDD available space. The HDD must be connected to a supported storage controller, such as the Gayle IDE, ELBOX FastATA 1200 or one of the multiple SCSI controllers supported.

To get usable speed I recommend as minimum a 68030 at 50 MHz and 32 MB of FAST RAM. You will notice nice performance boost if you jump to a 68040 or a 68060.

Apart from the minimum requirements, you can find a list of Amiga supported devices here.

Networking

I consider networking an essential for any UNIX operating system, and NetBSD is no exception. Apart of several Ethernet controllers, NetBSD supports NE2000 compatible PCMCIA cards. I currently own a D-Link DE-660+ and a Fiberline FL-4680 that work well with both, AmigaOS through the cnet.device and NetBSD.

How to install

Installing a new OS on your Amiga can make you lose the data in your hard drive, follow these instructions AT YOUR OWN RISK; knowing what you are doing is gold, backing up your data is platinum. I really recommend to try the setup on a emulator such as WinUAE before doing it in your real Amiga.

Installation of NetBSD/amiga is not as hard as most people think it is, but it requires some knowledge about Amiga disk partitioning, Amiga CLI and UNIX. The high level steps to perform a install are:

1. Installation media. You need the install media of the operating system. You can download the files from here or the ISO image. NetBSD supports CD-ROM drives connected to SCSI or ATAPI drives to the Gayle IDE. If you don't have a CD-ROM, you can have the installation files on a Amiga FFS partition or if you have network, using NFS or FTP.
2. Partition the hard drive. The hard drive is partitioned using HDToolBox following the instructions here. I highly recommend that the swap and the root partitions to be below the first 4 GB boundary. Further partitions can be created beyond this limit.
3. Write to miniroot filesystem to swap partition. Follow the instructions here. You will need to use the AmigaOS utility xstreamtodev or device-streams included in the NetBSD install files to write the miniroot.fs image file to the swap partition. xstreamtodev doesn't support writing beyond the 4 GB boundary, so make sure your swap partition is within the limit. If you want to retry installation, this step must be repeated.
4. Boot into NetBSD installation. Reboot your Amiga holding down the two mouse buttons to enter the Early Startup Menu and from the boot options, select the swap partition to boot from it. The NetBSD bootloader should appear, giving you the opportunity to change the boot options; if -A is present, the system will boot in dblPAL or dblNTSC mode (31kHz), but you can remove the parameter to make it boot in PAL or NTSC (15 kHz). Important note for kickstart >= 47.96 (Amiga OS 3.2) users: This step will fail in kickstart >= 47.96, but you can still boot the operating system or the installation with the AmigaOS runbootblock or loadbsd utilities that can be found in the NetBSD install ISO, or at this FTP folder. runbootblock syntax is runbootblock -d<device> -u<unit> -p<rdb-name>, ie. runbootblock -dscsi.device -u0 -pnetbsd-root. This issue was reported here and a patch has been integrated into mainstream, so the problem will be solved in NetBSD 10; it can be seen working in [ Show youtube player ].
5. Install NetBSD. From here the actual install of NetBSD starts. Follow the on-screen instructions and the install documentation. Be very careful when selecting the partition to format as root and swap for your NetBSD operating system. If you want to install your system using NFS or FTP you will need your ethernet adapter detected and boot and properly configured when install script ask you about IP configuration (no DHCP supported on the install!). Whatever source of installation you choose, you will need to remember the path where the install files are stored. If everything went well you should be able to select packages and file unpack will begin.
6. Run your new install. After file copy you will find yourself at the installation system command prompt. Write halt to shutdown this system and reboot into your actual install (select your root partition from Early Startup Menu or use runbootblock or loadbsd). When you see the login prompt you will be able to enter using the root account. There won't be a password until you set one with passwd. Congratulations! You have installed NetBSD on your Amiga.

Here you can see a real Amiga 1200 capture fully installing the system from the Internet in the following video:

[ Show youtube player ]

Post-installation steps

Even after successful install of NetBSD on your Amiga, if you are not familiar with the OS you will have a lot of questions: how do I switch to white over black screen? How do I setup the software package manager? How do I start the GUI (X11) in color? Can enable SSH access to my Amiga?...

I have gathered multiple miscellaneous post-installation notes on this GitHub Gist.

A note on CF cards and NetBSD

I found that CF cards that works well in AmigaOS not necessarily work well in NetBSD, as many of them lack ATA commands used by the operating system. This can be checked with the command atactl wd0 identify. If when performing write operations in your storage device you get similar errors to the following ones, then you are likely affected by the issue:

[   486.702655] autoconfiguration error: wdc0:0:0: lost interrupt
[   486.714186]         type: ata tc_bcount: 41472 tc_skip: 24064
[   486.728095] wd0a: device timeout writing fsbn 5611343 of 5611296-5611423 (wd0 bn 7420703; cn 7361 tn 12 sn 59), xfer 1f30, retry 0
[   499.221228] wdc0:0:0: timeout waiting for DRQ, st=0x50, err=0x00
[   499.241306] wd0a: device timeout writing fsbn 5611296 of 5611296-5611423 (wd0 bn 7420656; cn 7361 tn 12 sn 12), xfer 1f30, retry 1
[   509.830048] wdc0:0:0: timeout waiting for DRQ, st=0x50, err=0x00
[   509.830048] wd0a: device timeout writing fsbn 5611296 of 5611296-5611423 (wd0 bn 7420656; cn 7361 tn 12 sn 12), xfer 1f30, retry 2
[   509.830048] wdc0:0:0: timeout waiting for DRQ, st=0x50, err=0x00
[   509.830048] wd0a: device timeout writing fsbn 5611296 of 5611296-5611423 (wd0 bn 7420656; cn 7361 tn 12 sn 12), xfer 1f30, retry 3
[   512.041365] wd0: soft error (corrected) xfer 1f30

After switching from a CF card to a mSATA drive with a mSATA to IDE adapter the problem was solved. Even if the problem is solved by using a real hard disk, NetBSD/amiga team is working in fixing the issue. Current code at netbsd-current shows improvements when installed on CF cards, but it is still not working as expected.

Have fun with NetBSD on your Amiga!

[mfilos]

Nice and complete post there mate.

I remember seeing the video 1-2 months ago and was rather thorough.
After installing Debian Sarge with X on my BPPC at some point in my life, I though that it wasn't worth it
Command line NetBSD should be more usable for sure.

[cloverskull]

Thanks for sharing this detailed writeup! I think this will be fun to play with in UAE Perhaps I’ll try this on my A4000 once I have things working there as well.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about NetBSD vs Debian - I’m much more familiar with the Debian world than any of the BSDs.

[karloch]

Originally Posted by mfilos

Nice and complete post there mate.

I remember seeing the video 1-2 months ago and was rather thorough.
After installing Debian Sarge with X on my BPPC at some point in my life, I though that it wasn't worth it
Command line NetBSD should be more usable for sure.

Thank you! I hope it is useful and take some Amiga people into trying the OS, I think the team is doing a very good work. On a 68060 and AGA the X are very usable, not as fast as AmigaOS, but very usable. I have a video testing them:

[ Show youtube player ]

In any case, apart of the CPU, other components such as the RAM speed, RTG or fast SCSI drivers can influence the performance. Even if you stay on the console, there is a lot of fun there: up to day SSH client and server, http server, vim, python, gcc, curl, text mode browsers...

Originally Posted by cloverskull

Thanks for sharing this detailed writeup! I think this will be fun to play with in UAE Perhaps I’ll try this on my A4000 once I have things working there as well.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about NetBSD vs Debian - I’m much more familiar with the Debian world than any of the BSDs.

You are welcome to try! I would love a video capture of a powerful Amiga with RTG card showing NetBSD

I am actually much more familiar with Debian GNU/Linux than with NetBSD. I started exploring it because I was curious after knowing about his good Amiga hardware support. Most of my BSD experience comes from OSX (that's Darwin kernel).

In any case I must say I am really enjoying the NetBSD approach. Although it is just my opinion, NetBSD feels more like traditional UNIX than current Linux versions: it's smaller, simpler and follows the philosophy of do one thing and do it right. The approach of having the kernel and the userspace as part of a single OS distribution greatly benefits the Amiga as it makes easier to port the operating system as a whole.

On the other hand we have GNU/Linux on the Amiga, that is a bit harder than NetBSD. In this case we have a kernel -Linux- and a plethora of userspace choices, that are the distributions. Current versions of the Linux kernel works well so far on the Amiga -except some cases that are being worked on- Regarding the userspace Debian is the only distro giving some -unofficial- support to the Amiga (although you have a Gentoo stage 3 build for m68k as well). Going back to Debian, I have been facing several challenges with Debian Installer: the install images are only prepared to use a SCSI CD-ROM as installation media, as the hd-media and network ones are not compiled with the proper modules. I still have to dive deep again into the topic to look for a workaround, but without some work in Debian Installer it is not possible to setup the OS on a real hardware unless you use a CD, that is not my case.

I am curious to know how a current Debian Sid install behaves on the Amiga. The system is heavier than NetBSD, but it is still the Debian we all know and love.

[Estrayk]

Thank you very much for all the explanation and discovering to many of us all this Unix world for our Amigas.

[Hedeon]

Where are the kernel sources and the Amiga specific/needed patches for it? Just wondering if this is something that could run on a PPC card.

[karloch]

Originally Posted by Estrayk

Thank you very much for all the explanation and discovering to many of us all this Unix world for our Amigas.

You are very welcome! AmigaOS is such a good OS that other options didn't got much attention. There is a lot to explore on this path, and many ways to contribute.

Originally Posted by Hedeon

Where are the kernel sources and the Amiga specific/needed patches for it? Just wondering if this is something that could run on a PPC card.

You are looking for NetBSD/amigappc, but it never went beyond experimental. You have the kernel and the sets precompiled for PPC, but there is no miniroot for installation.

Regarding the sources:

• NetBSD source code
• Specific Amiga source code
• Specific Amiga PPC source code

[karloch]

Cutting edge update: just today Alain Runa sent a new version of the ZZ9000 driver, covering RTG and Ethernet. Audio part is half-done and disabled for the time being, while USB one is not implemented.

[phx]

Originally Posted by karloch

You are looking for NetBSD/amigappc, but it never went beyond experimental.

And I am responsible for the sorry state it is in.

Adam Ciarcinski started the port around 2000 and I worked a lot on it between 2008 and 2010 until I realized that it will never reach a stable and usable state.

You have the kernel and the sets precompiled for PPC, but there is no miniroot for installation.

You don't need a miniroot. There is "gobsdppc" to launch NetBSD/amigappc kernels from AmigaOS. You can do the initial userland installation of amigappc from a NetBSD/amiga system. I have a working amigappc partition on my A3000/CSPPC.

EDIT: It is probably nowhere mentioned where to get it. You find gobsdppc here: https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/phx/amigappc/
And the source text is here: http://sun.hasenbraten.de/~frank/NetBSD/gobsdppc.lha

Originally Posted by karloch

just today Alain Runa sent a new version of the ZZ9000 driver

Alain sent me the patch. I'm currently checking the sources and build a full release for testing purposes. I will probably commit his work tomorrow when all goes well.

[karloch]

Originally Posted by phx

And I am responsible for the sorry state it is in.

Adam Ciarcinski started the port around 2000 and I worked a lot on it between 2008 and 2010 until I realized that it will never reach a stable and usable state.

You don't need a miniroot. There is "gobsdppc" to launch NetBSD/amigappc kernels from AmigaOS. You can do the initial userland installation of amigappc from a NetBSD/amiga system. I have a working amigappc partition on my A3000/CSPPC.

It's an honor to meet you. Even if it didn't go past experimental, thank you so much for the work. Just for curiosity, what made you realize it would never reach an stable and usable state? I never went into the PPC route in the Amiga, so I wondered whatever the PPC was able to talk with the existing Amiga custom chips or the m68k was needed between them, that I image would make thing really tricky and difficult (just wondering, I have null knowledge in the subject).

Originally Posted by phx

Alain sent me the patch. I'm currently checking the sources and build a full release for testing purposes. I will probably commit his work tomorrow when all goes well.

I envy the big box Amigas for having hardware options like that Even if I don't have the chance to use a ZZ9000, I am really happy for the work of done in bringing new Amiga hardware support into NetBSD.

[vk3heg]

Originally Posted by karloch

On the other hand we have GNU/Linux on the Amiga, that is a bit harder than NetBSD. In this case we have a kernel -Linux- and a plethora of userspace choices, that are the distributions. Current versions of the Linux kernel works well so far on the Amiga -except some cases that are being worked on

That bug has now been fixed early this year after some testing by one of the other dev's to confirm that it was a kernel bug. (I was the first to report it, and another user confirmed). Annoyingly it only affects real hardware, and not the qemu emulation setup that a lot of the dev's use.

It's set to be fixed with the 6.3 kernel.


Here's how to install Debin/M68k without the cdrom:

On the harddrive/cf card simply write the content of the iSO file to some partition.
You can use swap partition - only it will be rewritten during the fist actual boot of Linux.

You can do it virtually on anything which understands Amiga partitioning of that drive.

dd if=debian.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=512 status=progress

Fire up the amiboot

During the setup there will be error as CD-ROM not detected.
Load CD-ROM drivers from removable media - YES
Manually select a CD-ROM module and device - YES
Module needed for accessing the CD-ROM: none
Device file for accessing the CD-ROM: /dev/hda2

Originally Posted by karloch

I am curious to know how a current Debian Sid install behaves on the Amiga. The system is heavier than NetBSD, but it is still the Debian we all know and love.

I only have a machine with 68040@40 that can linux and it's slow. 15Minutes to boot to a login prompt.

Unfortunately my A1200/A4000's with 68060's don't have enough ram.

[karloch]

Originally Posted by vk3heg

That bug has now been fixed early this year after some testing by one of the other dev's to confirm that it was a kernel bug. (I was the first to report it, and another user confirmed). Annoyingly it only affects real hardware, and not the qemu emulation setup that a lot of the dev's use.

It's set to be fixed with the 6.3 kernel.

Nice! It's good to see Amiga fixes and improvement in the mainstream of Linux kernel

Originally Posted by vk3heg

Here's how to install Debin/M68k without the cdrom:

On the harddrive/cf card simply write the content of the iSO file to some partition.
You can use swap partition - only it will be rewritten during the fist actual boot of Linux.

You can do it virtually on anything which understands Amiga partitioning of that drive.

dd if=debian.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=512 status=progress

Fire up the amiboot

During the setup there will be error as CD-ROM not detected.
Load CD-ROM drivers from removable media - YES
Manually select a CD-ROM module and device - YES
Module needed for accessing the CD-ROM: none
Device file for accessing the CD-ROM: /dev/hda2

Already tried that procedure copying the content of the ISO image into an AFFS, FAT and ext2 partition without success. A `lsmod` revealed that the modules needed to mount these filesystems are not present, just the iso9660 one. Maybe the way forward is to do a sector copy of the ISO (as you specified with the dd command) and then try to mount it as iso9660? I think I could achieve that with Roc Vallès device-streams tool for AmigaOS.

Originally Posted by vk3heg

I only have a machine with 68040@40 that can linux and it's slow. 15Minutes to boot to a login prompt.

Unfortunately my A1200/A4000's with 68060's don't have enough ram.

15 minutes? That's way too much. I made a test several years ago with kernel 3.16 and Debian 8.0, using an Amiga 600 with a 68030@25 and it took about 8 minutes; still too much but about half the time of your 68040@40; maybe you have time consuming daemons in your startup?

[ Show youtube player ]

Current NetBSD bootup including sshd in my Amiga 1200 with a 68060@50 takes about 2 minutes, a very acceptable time.

[vk3heg]

Originally Posted by karloch

Already tried that procedure copying the content of the ISO image into an AFFS, FAT and ext2 partition without success. A `lsmod` revealed that the modules needed to mount these filesystems are not present, just the iso9660 one. Maybe the way forward is to do a sector copy of the ISO (as you specified with the dd command) and then try to mount it as iso9660? I think I could achieve that with Roc Vallès device-streams tool for AmigaOS.

DD'ing it to the swap partition is the thing that makes it work. That preserves the format of the iso file structure.

Originally Posted by karloch

15 minutes? That's way too much. I made a test several years ago with kernel 3.16 and Debian 8.0, using an Amiga 600 with a 68030@25 and it took about 8 minutes; still too much but about half the time of your 68040@40; maybe you have time consuming daemons in your startup?

The machine has Debian 11 installed. So a lot has changed since the 2/3 days of linux kernels. Systemd is a bitch to the system, plus I've got no SCSI drives and am booting from a buddha IDE controller.

I've found some instructions to convert to systeminit, but don't want to nuke the system in the process if something goes wrong.

[redblade]

Originally Posted by karloch

Current NetBSD bootup including sshd in my Amiga 1200 with a 68060@50 takes about 2 minutes, a very acceptable time.

I wonder what the boot time for one of the early NetBSD versions is like?

Are you running a custom kernal? I have NetBSD 9.3 running on my 2012 ASUS low end craptop (Dual Core, Celeron, 2GB RAM Soldered, was slooooooww with Windows 8.x which is why I swapped to Lubuntu on it, I'm using it right now).

Do you cross-compile your applications on amd64 before sending it over? What are you using it for? MySQL, Apache?!?

[karloch]

Originally Posted by redblade

I wonder what the boot time for one of the early NetBSD versions is like?

Are you running a custom kernal? I have NetBSD 9.3 running on my 2012 ASUS low end craptop (Dual Core, Celeron, 2GB RAM Soldered, was slooooooww with Windows 8.x which is why I swapped to Lubuntu on it, I'm using it right now).

Do you cross-compile your applications on amd64 before sending it over? What are you using it for? MySQL, Apache?!?

It's not an early NetBSD version, the videos are from version 9.2 and 10.0_BETA. I am not using any custom kernel, just the standard WSCONS for the Amiga architecture, that you can find here in the case of the 10.0_BETA version. There is not any need to cross-compile applications, as you have a full binary distribution here and pkgin repo here.

What I use NetBSD on the Amiga? I missed to install some UNIX on my Amiga in the old days and I am doing now, surprised to see current version not just support it, but it runs pretty well with good hardware compatibility. It turns your Amiga into a networking swiss army knife with modern SSH (something I am missing in AmigaOS).

[Rotzloeffel]

Originally Posted by karloch

It turns your Amiga into a networking swiss army knife with modern SSH (something I am missing in AmigaOS).

If you have an Account on a1k.org, you can Look for some impressions of my System


https://www.a1k.org/forum/index.php?.../#post-1047139

[squidbass]

Back in 1995/6 I briefly worked at Easynet, a small internet providor based in London. We ran all our servers (mail, DNS, ftp etc.) on Amiga 3000s and 4000s - all runing NetBSD. Funnily enough, I was the only Linux guy on the team....Happy days though.