Which version of FreeBSD for RPi 1 Model B ?

B

balanga

I've had a RPi 1 Model B languishing in a drawer for a couple of years and not really done much with it. I did try installing FreeBSD on it at one time without success, but wondered what the current state of play was. Which version should I try, and is there any support for the Piface Digital which I've never really done anything with apart from switch a light on and off....
 
Hmmm. For my Pi 3, I simply went to raspbsd.org, downloaded the iso file, dd'ed it onto an SD card, plugged it in, booted, and ran (reasonably successfully, with glitches here and there). BUT: there are no images for anything older than RPi 1 model B+ and RPI 2/3 there. Hmmm. Not a helpful suggestion.
 
I did not see anything related to RPi B so I guess it's time to consign my RPi to the Linux bin and get a new RPi...
 
I don't own a RPi 1 so I cannot test this. I just know the image name looks like it is correct for your board.
Maybe it is for B+ and they dropped off the plus sign. I dunno.
 
Maybe I haven't installed it properly, it does start to boot but numerous errors occur such as
Code: 
** Unable to read file uEnv.txt **

...

Booting from: mmc 0 ubldr.bin
reading ubldr.bin
223912 bytes read at 30 ms (7.1 MiB/s)
## No elf image at address 0x00200000

...

Booting from disk0s2a:

can't load 'kernel'
 
I tried again using dd

It created two partitions, an MSDOSFS partition and a UFS partition, which I have been able to mount on another system.

There is no uEnv.txt on the MSDOSFS partition although there is a ubldr.bin. How do I get hold of this file?

There is no kernel file on the UFS partition....

Just wondering if anyone has this working? There doesn't really seem to be that much that could go wrong if the archive is OK. Maybe I'll try an older version...
 
I don't understand. You created partitions?

For my RPI3, I simply took the .img file, uncompressed it, and copied it with dd to the whole SD card (no partitions). The SD card then ends up containing BSD slices (device names mmcsd0sN, where N=1,2 or 2a), but hose were inside the image.
 
I didn't create partitions myself, I just ran dd which must have created the partitions on the SD card. I guess I need to find someone who has the RPIB working, as it sounds different to RPI3. Maybe I'll download the RPI3 image and see how that looks on the SD card when extracted.
 
Try a different SD card. If I recall correctly the Pi 1 is a bit finicky regarding cards, not all of them work without problems.
 
Yes there is. Running on my workbench at home. You log in, and it looks exactly like a normal FreeBSD ... until you start looking at the performance. You download it from the RaspBSD website. If you look in some other thread, you'll even find a discussion of some details. There are certain restrictions (like the wireless doesn't work, there is no emacs, and you have to use a weird setup for packages). Xwindows even works (even on the 7" display, although I haven't had time to enable the touch aspect). So far I haven't found any software other than emacs that is missing (although I haven't had much time to try everything). GPIO works out of the box (I can turn a LED on and sense a toggle switch). I like it better than Raspbian, but that's really a question of taste and usage requirements.
 
RPi 1 Model B works just fine for me with the FreeBSD 11.0 image. I used mine as a wireless bridge for a little while. Lack of official precompiled ports and updates put me off trying to do anything more meaningful with it.
 
asteriskRoss said:
RPi 1 Model B works just fine for me with the FreeBSD 11.0 image. I used mine as a wireless bridge for a little while. Lack of official precompiled ports and updates put me off trying to do anything more meaningful with it.
Click to expand...

It's good to know that someone has it working, since I had problems trying to boot it up, but as was mentioned earlier it could have been due to using the wrong type of card. What type/size are you using?

What's the best forum for RaspBSD?
 
After much trial and error I've finally managed to get to a FreeBSD login prompt on my Raspberry Pi!!!

This was with 12.0... This was the 17 Jan version, the latest version (29 Mar) would not load.
 
Just tried the '312722M' version and that worked.... but got
/tmp: write failed, filesystem is full
Click to expand...

after pkg install pkg

I'm using an 8GB SDHC card. Any recommendation on size of card required?
 
balanga said:
Just tried the '312722M' version and that worked.... but got
/tmp: write failed, filesystem is full
Click to expand...
after pkg install pkg
I'm using an 8GB SDHC card. Any recommendation on size of card required?
Click to expand...

Look closer on the error message. It tells you that /tmp is full, which does not imply that all the space of your SC card has been consumed. In order to increase the tmpfs(5) filesystem, edit /etc/fstab and change 50m to 100m
Code: 
tmpfs      /tmp        tmpfs    rw,mode=1777,size=100m   0    0
Then restart.
 
Mine has:-
Code: 
md      /tmp     mfs  rw,noatime,-s30m    0  0

What should it look like?

And which version are you using?
 
This was discussed in another thread. The default has 30M (that's the -s30m) for /tmp and another 30M for /var/tmp, which in my opinion is a waste, since hardly anything ever uses /var/tmp. So I changed the line for /tmp to have "-s60m", and commented out the line for /var/tmp (so it is now on the root file system), and now the pkg command runs fine.

Now I should just find some time and energy to do something productive with the RPi3.
 
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