FreeBSD Wandboard r270855

I recently got a Beaglebone Black.   I was very excited; it’s similar to a Pi, but has 60 GPIO ports! Getting a serial console up on it was not quite a simple as I thought, since the BeagleBone uses FTDI.  Following the instructions here I installed the OS X serial driver for FTDI.   After plugging…

How the FDT works In specific, I’m looking at this file bcm2835.dtsi which contains the hardware definitions for the BCM2835, the SOC which powers a Raspberry Pi. Primarily, i’m interested in how to read it.   To really make sense of this, you should have this pdf at hand; it’s the hardware manual for BCM2835.  If…

Crochet-BSD is a github project which supports building FreeBSD disk images for various platforms such a RaspberryPi, BeagleBoard and others.  I had a Soekris 4501 laying around, so I decided to extend Crochet to build images for it. So, firstly, I needed a kernel.  Building the kernel config for Soekris is explained pretty well here….

I’ve been learning about FreeBSD kernel development, and discovering that, not surprisingly, it’s very, very slow to compile on a Raspberry Pi.  So, I decided to figure out how to compile the Pi kernel on a nice fast AMD-64. Firstly, get the kernel sources to a subdirectory under a non-root user profile: mkdir fbsd cd…

I’ve been using FreeBSD jails for a while, and was looking for a simple way to create jail filesystems.   After some reading, I came up with this simple script which creates full FreeBSD filesystems.   The filesystem can then be used via jail.conf. #!/bin/bash JAILNAME=$1 echo “kjail “$1 JAIL_HOME=/tank/kjail/ FTP=http://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/11.1-RELEASE/ # # get packages # if…

The FreeBSD ARM team have completed the work to support multicore on ARM.  You can read the announcement here.  I’ve made a new build of FreeBSD ARM for Wandboard, which you can download here. The dmesg output is here, and here is the sysctl showing four cores [Kroot@wandboard:~ # sysctl -a | grep hw.ncpu hw.ncpu:…