SOEKRIS image for FreeBSD-11

This build fixes the recent console speed bug, and include super-pages, a new feature recently added to the ARM kernel. The image file is here, and the boot log is here.

One of the best things about the Pi is that it’s small, and portable.  It’s very tempting to use it on wireless networks, unattended.  Sadly, in the real world, any wireless network can be hacked, and any device on wireless should be considered vulnerable.  So, pf is an easy way to harden your Pi. The…

I have a number of disks in my FreeBSD box which exist only as backups of data.  I prefer that they not be mounted all the time, but instead mounted on use.  They are 2x internal SATA disks and an external USB3 disk.   This blog post explains how they are set up to auto-mount….

The FDT is the “Flattened Device Tree”, a simple device tree used in embedded FreeBSD, for example on a Pi.  Every architecture has a DTS file, which contains a human-readable list of hardware for that architecture.   For example, the Pi FTD is here.  You should notice that there are declarations for: cpu axi (the…

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….

Recently I found myself wanting to understand how I2C for FreeBSD ARM, on the Pi works.  The first step is to understand the GPIO implementation on Pi, since on a Pi, I2C is implemented on the GPIO. So, here’s the basic summary. Firstly, the FreeBSD source browser is here. In the directory /sys/ is the…