I have been putting FreeBSD on a couple of Raspberry Pis. One was an old Raspberry Pi Model B (256M of RAM– the first one released). The other was a newer RPI 3B. On the RPI3B I had a 64GB MicroSD card. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I burned the FreeBSD 13.0 disk img with Etcher<\/a> and it booted up fine. The install process went pretty seamlessly until the first reboot. Then the Pi would hang up right after it showed the Ethernet MAC address:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The PI would just sit there with no error message. I re-did the install a couple of times, tried a different SD card, etc. Eventually, I decided to try FreeBSD 12 instead. This one got to the same place, but then eventually dropped into a mountroot <\/em>prompt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At this point I knew it had something to do with the root filesystem not working right. I tried to manually load the root filesystem from the mountroot <\/em>prompt, but it still would not work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I had an inkling in the back of my mind that this likely had something to do with growfs<\/em>, the program that gets run on boot in order to expand the size of the root partition to the size of the entire SD card. After all, in my testing I had tried a couple of times where all I did was install FreeBSD, login as root and reboot immediately. <\/p>\n\n\n\n gorwfs <\/em>is run automatically from the line in \/etc\/rc.conf<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I needed to turn this off on the SD card image. So on another FreeBSD machine I unxzipped the Raspberry Pi img: <\/p>\n\n\n\n Next I needed to link the img file to a virtual device so I could mount it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then mount it– note that the root partition is partition 2, and you can find it at \/dev\/md0s2a<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Then I had to disable growfs <\/em>in \/mnt\/etc\/rc.conf<\/em> using sed (or a text editor).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unmount and disable the mdconfig<\/em>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n After this surgery to the img file you can re-flash the SD card and when you run the installer your root filesystem will not be auto expanded, and your install will not hang after the first reboot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am not yet sure what the underlying issue is. I tried manually resizing the partition on the SD card to 32 GB and 16GB and 8GB, and all would not boot. It may be a 4GB limit (which is odd since this is arm64 bit). <\/p>\n\n\n\n In my case I ended up moving the root filesystem to a USB drive anyway. So I did not worry too much about all the wasted space on the SD card. I suppose you could also create another partition and and mount it someplace like \/home<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This should at least get you started with the Raspberry Pi 3B on FreeBSD 13 or FreeBSD 12. This bug should be reported, though. I hope to soon, but likely should do some more testing first. Feel free to report it!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have been putting FreeBSD on a couple of Raspberry Pis. One was an old Raspberry Pi Model B (256M of RAM– the first one released). The other was a newer RPI 3B. On the RPI3B I had a 64GB … Continue reading miibus0: on smsc0 \nsmscphy0: PHY 1 on miibus0 \nsmscphy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto \nue0: on smsc0 \nue0: Ethernet address: b8:27:eb:xx:xx:xx<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
growfs_enable=\"YES\"<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
unxz FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-RPI.img.xz<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
# mdconfig -a -t vnode -f FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-RPI.img -u 0<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
# mount \/dev\/md0s2a \/mnt<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
# sed -ibkp 's\/growfs_enable=\"YES\"\/growfs_enable=\"NO\"\/' rc.conf<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
umount \/mnt\nmdconfig -d -u 0<\/pre>\n\n\n\n