What do I do with these aspirational RockPro64, BananaPi, EspressoBin, and Netgate ARM boards if I want to run FreeBSD?
There is an official RockPro64 image but video does not appear to be supported. It has a serial console, but mind-numbingly it could not boot while a serial adapter is attached. I have the adapter but prefer simple use the onboard HDMI.
Is anyone having luck with these boards?
Need ‘em?
@silverwizard Do you recall having the issues that the serial port needed to be disconnected during boot and did an image support HDMI without modification? Do you recall the version of FreeBSD?
@dexter
I'd be stoked to try poking around on a banana pi. Which one is it?
@paulgatling The Banana PI BPI R1 which stands out for the SATA port and switch.
@dexter
That looks like fun! I doubt I have the chops to get openbsd running on it..
@dexter
I have an few of those sorts of boards, they do nothing more than gather dust :-(. Speaking of gathering dust, I have a pile of powered speakers I could bring in sometime Sunday or on Monday afternoon.
@michaelgalassi You headed to BSD Pizza this month?
@michaelgalassi @AFresh1 See you there? Meet before?
@dexter I managed to boot my RK3399-based Rock Pi 4B+ into FreeBSD (~14.2?) with HDMI terminal output with no issues. That was using the stock RockPro64 image with the board's custom uboot image from ports written over the relevant block.
I subsequently discovered that FreeBSD's dwc3 driver doesn't support USB peripheral/gadget mode though, so I haven't looked into it much further in terms of how well everything works. I'd love to have the resources to make these boards well-supported.
@dexter My (admittedly basic) understanding is that the uboot image includes the device tree for the specific board, as we for some reason still don't have a firmware-based device discovery mechanism on arm64 that all SoC/board manufacturers actually use.
Of course, I don't know how well-maintained and tested those uboot images in ports actually are for each individual board and FreeBSD version.
@dexter@bsd.network I imagine Netgate has a FreeBSD image due to pfSense.
@mrhamel You’d think.
It’s based on an off-the-shell board and last I checked, they forgot to upstream their patches to support it.
@dexter I tried when I bought mine over 2 years ago and haven't since. I've updated the freebsd wiki for arm 6 months ago did you go thru it ? If not usefull i'd ask on the mailing list.
