FreeBSD on Raspberry Pi 2

2015-09-23 14:26

I was trying out different images to use as base for a project of mine and thought I'd try to get the FreeBSD image for Raspberry Pi to run since it's been supported for a while now.

TL;DR I got 10.2-STABLE to boot on Model B+ and 11-CURRENT to boot on Raspberry Pi 2 Model B.

It turns out it was harder than I thought to get the image to boot. First of all there was no video signal out so I had to connect to the Pi using a USB to TTL serial cable.

What I found out was that the 10.2-STABLE image only ran on the Raspberry Pi model B, got Unknown Filesystem error on Raspberry Pi model B+ and did nothing at all on Raspberry Pi 2 model B. See this pictorial bying guide forum post for more information on the different models.

I did get the FreeBSD 11-CURRENT to boot on Raspberry Pi 2 model B. For now I was satisfied with this since the WiFi dongle I wanted to use didn't work out of the box with FreeBSD I decided to put it aside as a candidate OS for now.

During my trials I found this great resource for FreeBSD on ARM based devices. I also was thinking of trying to build my own image using Crochet.