arm distribution

[yonas]

I'd love to run mfsbsd on my Raspberry Pi 2. Would you be able to create an arm distribution? Stock FreeBSD already has support: https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/arm/Raspberry%20Pi

[ghost]

I'm guessing this would be very non-trivial. I don't know if the Pi can boot off USB, even, might have to do it with microSD. I think iet's doable, but you'd need to combine mfsbsd and crochet (if I'm not mistaken), in an interesting way.

Have you tried installing FreeBSD to it normally? I've been playing with a Beaglebone white and it's been interesting enough as it is, at least for now. I haven't heard of any way to netboot the Pi or Beaglebone, which would make this a lot more interesting.

[yonas]

It should be possible to boot off a USB drive after installing a boot loader to the microSD card. For eg. I'm able to boot Ubuntu off a USB stick using BerryBoot. BerryBoot needs to be installed to a microSD card, but you can install and boot other OSs from there.

I haven't installed FreeBSD yet, I need to get a larger SD card (mine is only 1GB).

The RPi U-Boot bootloader seems to be able to boot kernels off the network. Oleksandr Tymoshenko's branch is able to boot FreeBSD, but it looks like the code hasn't been updated in a few years.

[yonas]

I would be happy with running mfsbsd solely off of the SD card, but patching crochet to make it run mfsbsd off a USB drive would be nice too. It would be especially great for people who have multiple arm devices that want to use a single mfsbsd USB drive for all of them.

crochet's fstab file for the Raspberry Pi 2 looks for FreeBSD in the second partition of the SD Card. If we changed that to point to the USB drive, maybe that'd work?

And it seems that the FreeBSD boot loader for Raspberry Pi already uses U-Boot.