Solved Raspberry Pi 4

Hi.

Searched the forum and found a lot of topics about the RPi4 and similar devices, but none with this specific issue mentioned, which really surprised me.

Installed to a microsd card the RPI3 img from here: https://www.freebsd.org/where/

More specifically, the 12.2-RELEASE version. Tried both balenaEtcher and Raspberry Pi Imager. Neither worked. Booted the pi, and it claims no sd card is inserted, asking to insert an sd card. The same screen you get when no card is inserted, but with some errors saying it can't find a boot file or something like that.

Also, for clarity, this page: https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm/Raspberry Pi says: "For Raspberry Pi 4 use the image for RPI3."

No idea what's going on, and was hoping someone could help?
Samuel
 
This works for me on RPI3, sorry I don't have a 4 to test

unxz FreeBSD-12.2-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-RPI3.img.xz
dd if=FreeBSD-12.2-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-RPI3.img of=/dev/disk2 bs=10240
 
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Based on feedback from the mailing lists, RPi4 needs a newish firmware on the SDcard (warning: this is firmware files that the Pi loads from the SD card when it boots, it is not the EEPROM contents / update - that is a different thing).- I think 12.2-RELEASE is too old to have the correct files for the Pi4 on it.
Try to boot a FreeBSD 13.0-RC5 image on your Pi4, if that works you can try to copy the relevant firmware files (for the Pi4) from the 13.0-RC5 sdcard to the 12.2-RELEASE card.
Note: I haven't tested this myself (yet).
 
Hello, I didn't remember, why but BSD 13 has a better support for RPI4.

I've start to build a RPI4 cluster. I try to share some experiments, you'll find info on the installation of FreeBSD 13 on this blog post :

 
FWIW, I got the FreeBSD 13.0-RC5 image to boot on my Pi4 (8 GB). The boot process was .. strange. I had to "prod" the keyboard a few times (by pressing a key), it looked like the boot process fell asleep. I wrote the image like this xz -dc FreeBSD-13.0-RC5-arm64-aarch64-RPI.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/da5 bs=4M status=progress (da5 is my SD card reader).
Code:
root@generic:~ # freebsd-version -ku
13.0-RC5
13.0-RC5
root@generic:~ # uname -a
FreeBSD generic 13.0-RC5 FreeBSD 13.0-RC5 #0 releng/13.0-n244727-f8a134d0ef1: Fri Apr  2 06:15:20 UTC 2021
     root@releng1.nyi.freebsd.org:/usr/obj/usr/src/arm64.aarch64/sys/GENERIC  arm64
I hope this helps.
 
Gentlemen, what model and revision are you guys testing?

Mine is a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, rev 1.2.

Here's the probe: https://bsd-hardware.info/?probe=951c3e534c

I used this iso image: https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/re...FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-RPI.img.xz

In short: didn't recognized WiFi card, audio card, etc.

Am I doing anything wrong here? Well, probably.

Would you kindly please lend me a hand on this? Thanks a lot.
When I said "it works great" that was before I installed a gui. The resolution is very small, too small to work with on my 1080p display that normally would support up to 1080p does not with FreeBSD + RPi 4. Sound as a result I never even tested, was kind discouraged by the small display size and took a break from it.


Edit:

Wifi didn't work. At least not the built-in. Needed to use a wireless network adapter connect to my router.
 
Thank you very much gentlemen. Looks like I'm going for Raspian or Ubuntu server on RPI4. msplsh I saw the wiki page a moment before reading your answer, :p
 
WiFi is explicitly stated as "not working" on the wiki page. Sounds is "IDK".
I wonder when WiFi networking support will be included in the RPI image? Don't all RPi 3's and 4's use the same or similar WiFi device? Also it'd be nice to have sysinstall on the image in addition to bsdconfig.
 
I wonder when WiFi networking support will be included in the RPI image? Don't all RPi 3's and 4's use the same or similar WiFi device? Also it'd be nice to have sysinstall on the image in addition to bsdconfig.
I just got a response on Twitter from someone about the lack of WiFi networking support in RPI. He said it is a Raspberry Pi problem (not a FreeBSD problem) for having a closed hardware ecosystem, and not providing driver support for other OSes. If the drivers existed, they'd be included. That's a bummer.
 
Paying somebody to reverse the blobs.

By "it's not a FreeBSD problem" they mean nobody made the hardware "available" to FreeBSD. Sort of like how Apple doesn't make M1 computers "available" to other operating systems, but they're not locked out of it.

EDIT: I should have looked closer. This project is actually a bit easier than reversing a binary, but seems to be in service of making these sorts of drivers easier to create in the future by putting in a little more work now.
 
By looking at Phabricator, BZ is currently working on linux KPI problems, which would facilitate just using the driver directly.
 
The aarch64 images are 'the whole shebang'. They contain dtb's for all our supported arm64 boards.
Should boot on a wide range of arm64 boards.
Every board has their own little quirks. So it might take some massaging.

the aarch64-RPI image only has DTB's for most of the the RPi lineup.
More of a specialized version for Pi.
Almost guaranteed to work on RPI2(v1.2), RPi3, RPi4

Hence the generic aarch64 ISO will be larger because it is not specialized. It contains binaries for many platforms.
 
Hence the generic aarch64 ISO will be larger because it is not specialized. It contains binaries for many platforms.
This is kinda bull. The ISO could be bigger because it is a different image style.
There will be more DTB's on the generic aarch64 image but size-wize I cant imagine it being that much larger.
My guess maybe 75 megabytes for all aarch64 image DTB's.
The images could be authored differently. Most of our Arm .img files are now 3GB.
 
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