FreeBSD can't see mini-SD slot?

landgazr

landgazr

Hello all!

I've been working in the tech field for a long time and have worn a lot of hats. Currently, I'm doing DevOps.

Back in the early 00's, I used to work at a software store, and a guy who rented out the back showed me this operating system called FreeBSD. It was awesome. When I eventually started to use Unix or Unix-like operating systems, I began with Minix and then Slackware. Then for the next several years I experimented with Debian- and RHEL-based Linux distros before settling on Fedora as my OS-of-choice. I'm not sure how *BSD ended back up on my radar but it brought back fond memories, and FreeBSD appears to still be going strong. So I installed it on my MinnowBoard MAX and I'm having lots of fun :) It seems pretty snappy and anecdotally I hear that the TCP/IP stack edges out Linux in some way but I don't remember specifics...?

Anyway, right now I am running FreeBSD 11.0 off a mini-SD card that's plugged into a USB card reader. It runs great, but my MinnowBoard MAX has a mini-SD slot, and when I tried to install to the mini-SD card in the slot from a thumb drive, the install didn't seem to recognize the internal slot reader at all. I've tried sysinfo, camcontrol, dmesg, gpart, geom....it only seems to show my USB SD/MS reader. And when the reader isn't in there, it doesn't show anything that indicates it found the slot at all.

I am wondering why FreeBSD perhaps didn't recognize the internal slot? I was thinking that it was perhaps because of boot order in UEFI? Like the machine had to perhaps try to boot from the drive in order to enumerate it? I really have no idea. Although not ideal, for the time being I don't mind using my reader. It is more of a learning sandbox right now as I get my feet wet again with *BSD.

I saw SD card images on the download page for platforms like RPI2. Is it that those images are the only ones supported to be run from a "native" SD card slot?
 
I was trying to build an Crochet board file for platforms like the Turbot. It needs 64bit UEFI only support.

Crochet is one way to build images for SD cards. Mostly Arm platforms but I have the i386 board file working for embedded images.
Nice to have packages pre-installed. I really want to have amd64 support on Crochet.
 
Wow thank you for the quick reply! I'll check out Crochet, although I know support isn't there yet for the SD slot (but hopefully will be soon).
 
Crochet has a basic board build with the -b option. It just works. Great for simple builds. Crochet is only a shell script.
If you make a custom board file you can do packages and slipstream custom files you might want in the overlay folder.

NanoBSD is another route but it is focused on i386 as well. It creates a read only filesytem with a redundant second slice so you can update and if it fails you can fall back to second slice. Its used by FreeNAS, NAS4Free, pfSense, OpnSense and BSD router project.
It is also simply a shell script with some hand work needed. There is an embedded directory under usr/src/tools/tools/nanobsd which contains some more recent configuration files mostly for Arm but there is an i386 build as well..Some of this stuff requires manual tweaking.

And the third option is non-official but nice. mfsBSD. Here he runs only in memory so gentile on SD cards and other flimsy media's.
 
Have you tried putting
Code: 
mmc_load="YES"
mmcsd_load="YES"
sdhci_load="YES"
into your /boot/loader.conf file?
They might just do what you need. ;-)
 
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