[Nut-upsuser] CI: Some good news

[Jim Klimov]

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 <jimklimov+nut at gmail.com> 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 <jimklimov+nut at gmail.com>
> 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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