Upstream balenaOS patches

[acostach]

We use these patches in balenaOS for building unipi-kernel-modules with kernel 5.15.92

Would be great if we could have them in upstream, since they allow building with newer kernel versions

[floion]

@miroslav-ondra @martytriska ^

[martytriska]

Hi @floion ,

thank you for your effort!

However, this repository contains legacy 1st generation of the kernel drivers. Please consider upgrading your project to a new generation of drivers https://github.com/UniPiTechnology/unipi-kernel-modules.

Can you please transform and move this PR to this repo?

Thanks!

[acostach]

Hi @martytriska and thanks for your reply. Can the drivers in the new repository https://github.com/UniPiTechnology/unipi-kernel-modules be unloaded at runtime?

[martytriska]

Hi @acostach, yes you are right. These modules should be unloadable at runtime (of course, you have to respect the order of particular modules during the unloading process). However, on some variants of Raspberry Pi, they can "block" the reboot without unloading them. As a workaround, our pre-compiled OS Images contain a tiny "daemon" that does the unloading stuff just before rebooting.

[acostach]

thanks @martytriska ! Do you know what's causing the halt on reboot? And what exact modules need to be unloaded prior to rebooting, I could check that in the daemon if you can point me to the sources

[acostach]

also @martytriska , I'm seeing this on the UniPi4 with the newer unipi-kernel-modules:

[   12.306049] unipi_iogroup_bus: loading out-of-tree module taints kernel.
[   12.326259] unipi-spi spi0.3: spi channel looks empty
[   12.334598] unipi-spi spi0.2: spi channel looks empty
[   12.347201] unipi-spi spi0.1: spi channel is alive
[   12.347299] unipi-spi spi0.1: Undefined modbus-address. Channel inaccessible via modbus chrdev.
[   12.348512] unipi-spi: Driver registered. Major Version: 2.52:2024:04:26

And there's no /dev/unipi* device drivers. Do I need to install other packages or dependencies in the image?

[miroslav-ondra]

New devicetree overlays are required. They are generated from templates (os-configurator-data-neuron), but they are not exported to public Github yet.
Download file https://repo.unipi.technology/debian/pool/neuron-main/u/unipi-os-configurator-data/unipi-os-configurator-data_0.68~bookworm-neuron64_arm64.deb and use overlays from it.
Sources will be available in the future.

[martytriska]

@acostach Almost all Linux devices under /dev/ are created during driver initialization based on device tree overlays applied. This process is managed by the unipi-os-configurator tool, which is generic for all Unipi platforms, and unipi-os-configurator-data, which is specific to each PLC family. These tools use data from the device EEPROM, provided by the unipi-id kernel module, to configure all necessary overlays for the particular PLC model.

To dig deeper, I recommend you use our pre-build OS Image as a starting point.

[acostach]

Thanks @martytriska , @miroslav-ondra , could you please point me to the OS image I should check?

What I've tried:

• Latest OpenSource image for Neuron neuron-opensource-os_image-20220607.0.zip from https://kb.unipi.technology/en:hw:02-neuron:download-image:03-opensource and it looks like it's using the old unipi-kernel-modules-v1 because the industrialiio and unipi modules can't be unloaded.

• Latest RaspberryPi OS lite from March 15th 2024 in which I ran the script from https://repo.unipi.technology/debian/ as per the instructions at https://kb.unipi.technology/en:sw:04-unipi-firmware . With this I'm getting:

Updating the package list
Hit:1 http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm InRelease
Hit:2 http://deb.debian.org/debian-security bookworm-security InRelease                             
Hit:3 http://archive.raspberrypi.com/debian bookworm InRelease                                      
Hit:4 http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates InRelease                                       
Get:5 https://repo.unipi.technology/debian bookworm InRelease [127 kB]        
Fetched 127 kB in 3s (37.9 kB/s)   
Reading package lists... Done
W: https://repo.unipi.technology/debian/dists/bookworm/InRelease: Key is stored in legacy trusted.gpg keyring (/etc/apt/trusted.gpg), see the DEPRECATION section in apt-key(8) for details.
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Package unipi-kernel-modules is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
However the following packages replace it:
  unipi-kernel-modules-dkms

E: Package 'unipi-kernel-modules' has no installation candidate
E: Unable to locate package unipi-firmware
E: Unable to locate package unipi-common
Cleaning temporary files
Cleaning temporary files

and if I try the replacement package

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo apt-get install unipi-kernel-modules-dkms
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 unipi-kernel-modules-dkms : Depends: unipi-os-configurator-data but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo apt-get install unipi-os-configurator-data
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Package unipi-os-configurator-data is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package 'unipi-os-configurator-data' has no installation candidate

[martyy665]

Hi @acostach,

as a good starting point, you can use the following beta testing image(s):

32bit
https://kb.unipi.technology/files:software:os-images:neuron-base-os-hidden

64bit
https://kb.unipi.technology/files:software:os-images:neuron64-base-os-hidden

[acostach]

Thanks @martyy665 , @miroslav-ondra I've looked into the 64bit Neuron image and can see the overlays being applied by the boot script according to the detected configuration.

It's not clear to me though if the unipi-tools installed in the beta-image is at the same revision as https://github.com/UniPiTechnology/unipi-tools, because the unipi-tools repository has last been updated 3 years ago. It seems there's also other packages in the beta-image which aren't available in github.

For example I see files like /opt/unipi/firmware/opt/unipi/firmware/00-1.img provided by a package named unipi-firmware6, which are not part of the unipi-os-configurator-data.deb.

Is there an ETA for when the BSP in the beta image will become production ready, also with sources available in github?

Thank you

[acostach]

@martytriska @miroslav-ondra @martyy665 ^

[martyy665]

Hi @acostach,

the unipi-tools repo has been updated to the latest version. Can you check if everything is clear for you now?

Regarding the firmware - please use only 6.xx version as previous legacy versions are no longer supported and do not contain all current HW. All firmware files for version 6.xx are in .img format and follow the naming pattern xx-y.img. All of them are provided by unipi-firmware6 Debian package in its binary form. In the tools repo package, just tools for firmware upgrading are contained.

You can download any of the packages from the repo directly:

https://repo.unipi.technology/

Please let me know if there is anything else you need.

Thank you for your effort :-)!

[tomashora]

Hello @acostach / @floion, could you please check the above suggestion and provide us with your feedback/opinion what else coud we do to help?

[acostach]

Hi @tomashora , sorry, I've been caught up with other projects and didn't get to look at the updated repositories yet. I plan to get back to this in the following weeks and will let you know. Thank you!