Release 2026-02-13

FRIDAY THE 13TH, WITH SOME EVIL COMMITS (fixing file permissions to 666)

Re-fixed the bug where re-flashing the same image to the same card would cause zpool to report corruption. There is some chatter in upstream ZFS circles to look into this scenario and get it resolved, but for now, the local work-around is re-applied with the larger disk alignments.

GPS Serial devices now work at 115200 baud instead of "4800" (9600) baud. Yeah, thanks to a bug in the original serial device implementation in Stratipi, we were setting the port to 4800 baud, but the port doubled that and actually ran at 9600 baud. With the bump in speed, there is also a bug fix for setting/reported speed!

Raspberry Pi 3 is nearly functional. In prototyping with manual configurations, I've had it working for a bit, but getting a stable config that works on both the Pi 3 and Pi 4 at the same time has yet to materialize. It is mainly a case of accepting one compromise or another.

There were potential race conditions all along with the serial interface sending character data that could cause the U-Boot or FreeBSD Loader to break. U-Boot seems to be working better with these changes, while the FreeBSD Loader is now set to no longer prompt for input (meaning no longer an option to drop to single-user mode). This has been a known bug for almost a decade apparently!? https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=229976

Oh, and the simplest of changes: added the "python" package. We already had Python 3.11, so the "python" package simply adds the "python" symlink so it is easier to invoke.

Release 2026-02-09

Stratipi has been running stable for me for months, and this build process is working great!

Startipi can now build itself from within a running Stratipi environment.

Additionally, it no longer creates an arbitrary folder on the system root while building, instead it now creates a temporary folder inside of /tmp to do all of the build work. And no worries, this is just a mount point for the temporary ZFS volume, so it uses no actual tmpfs space.

We're also aligning partitions to 4MB boundaries instead of 1MB boundaries because the Sandisk Industrial SD Cards (8GB in my test case) use 4MB erase blocks. This helps prevent erase/write amplification.

Additionally for the SD card, autotrim has been disabled, and replaced by a weekly "zpool trim" job instead to help reduce the erase/write amplification.

RC1 - 2026-01-31

Release Candidate for Stratipi!

Almost everything has been fixed up.
Performance and accuracy have been significantly improved.
This build is Totally Awesome!

Beta - 2026-01-24

Initial beta image release for the Stratipi Network Time Server!