Install FreeBSD on beaglebone black

Hi guys.
I can install Linux on my BeagleBone Black and last day i tried install FreeBSD on my board, I downloaded sd image file from FreeBSD.org
i restore image file in my sd card but when i put it in board, beaglebone does not find anything to boot , when i pressed boot button the same thing happened what should i do?

Do you have a 3.3V serial TTL to plug into the beagle? Can you put a copy of the output on here so we can see what the board is saying as it boots up?

p.s. the 3.3V cable is best bought from RS components or Farnell, as Amazon sells fake ones that don’t work.

Cheers
Rich

interesting. i did not know there was an arm port of freebsd
do you have a link ?

No i don’t and in this situation i can’t buy cable.
is there any way to know what happening?

From https://www.freebsd.org/where.html choose one of images

Buildroot is easy peasy for beaglebone, and you can make custom builds of Linux with allsorts of good stuff built in.

Thanks but i want know why beaglebone does not boot FreeBSD.

TO :

ek8406@gmail.com

Hi,

can you make sure that you have 2 volumes defined on your SD card?

A root and a boot volume.

What are the files you have in the root volume?

Cheers
Rich

I have 3 partitions on my sd card MSDOSBOOT rootfs and an unknown partion

You should have a ROOTFS and a BOOTFS.

One is about BOOT is 20Mb and the ROOT is about 500Mb or bigger.

The BOOT is a FAT and the ROOT is a EXT4 partition.

Give those a check first.

The ROOT contains directories:

bin etc lib32 lost+found mnt proc run sys usr
dev lib linuxrc media opt root sbin tmp var

Does yours?

have a look at /etc

what files do you have?

I don’t have any of them and i don’t have BOOTFS

I should say i want boot FreeBSD not linux and FreeBSD use zfs

Right… Not sure how that is going to work. Is it a bare metal code platform that works direct with the ARM ?

Sorry i was wrong it use ufs and yes it is

sorry its not zfs its ufs, but yes it is

FreeBSD doesn't use EXT4, so it may have a very different boot layout.
I expect there may be EXT4 or FAT partition there for the boot-loader
(uboot) but FreeBSD has its own filesystem (and its own disklabel format
within its partitions).

I had another look at BSD.

Yes, lord only knows how you would convince the beagle to boot and root into that.

Is this the thing the basis of what now runs on Apple Mac’s?

What would you use that for? I would miss the Linux/drivers folder too much.

Are you stuck indoors as well? I will be here until June. I might as well learn BSD as well.

Cheers

Richard

FreeBSD isn’t what runs on the Apple Mac as such. The Mac kernel, “Darwin”, is derived from the CMU Mach microkernel research, with a BSD-derived kernel running as a single-server, rather than a multi-server configuration (like minix or QNX). In the CMU days, before NeXT, that was based on the original 4.2BSD distribution, but I believe that it’s been spruced up a bit in the macOS days with (at least) FreeBSD’s virtual memory subsystem and network stack, and a chunk of NetBSD-derived other pieces. The device drivers still live outside BSD, in Mach “DriverKit” land, which is why they’re C++. The user-land is mostly FreeBSD, and has had several refreshes over the years.

FreeBSD itself doesn’t have a microkernel: it’s old-school unikernel all the way down to the hardware, and the device drivers live in /usr/src/sys/modules or there-abouts. Sure, there almost certainly aren’t as many useful-for beaglebone drivers in there. The OS was x86 and x86_64 only for a significant chunk of its life. People who wanted BSD-on-toaster were shown where to find NetBSD. I’m not entirely sure why that’s changed, but my guess is that people wanted “big iron” OS to run on their big-iron Sparc, Power and now Arm systems.

Why would you want to do that? I can only speak for myself, but it’s more a case of not ever changing what wasn’t broken: I’ve been running BSD since about 1986 or so. If you say that it’s possible to get FreeBSD to boot on my beaglebone-AI, then I might just give it a go! On the other hand, the reason that I have the BBAI is to play with some DSP on the C66x cores, and the interface drivers seem kernel-version fragile, and all of the TI tools are clearly set up for Linux, so perhaps I’ll just sit tight for now. I’m still trying to come to terms with a system that doesn’t install the source and headers by default, which doesn’t do “netstat” properly, which has all of these system-* commands, and which seems to bork it’s USB-audio stack when left open but unused for long periods. Tracking down slow ephemerons or heisenbugs is about the least fun part of programming, IMO.

I’m currently trying to wrap my head around the OpenCL-ness of the DSP access. I was expecting something in DSPBios with a mailbox system to the host, and perhaps that’s there under the covers, but all of the examples use openCL, and if it aint broke, etc. Still, I’m not sure how you do “initialization” and frame-to-frame persistent state in OpenCL land. If anyone has pointers, I’d appreciate it.

Cheers,

I had another look at BSD.

Yes, lord only knows how you would convince the beagle to boot and root
into that.

Is this the thing the basis of what now runs on Apple Mac's?

I think Andrew gave a pretty in depth run-down, but yes, Apple MacOS X
is a distant BSD fork, as are a lot of "Unix" platforms (Solaris comes
to mind).

What would you use that for? I would miss the Linux/drivers folder too
much.

Every OS has its pluses and minuses. I personally use OpenBSD a lot on
various devices for router tasks.

Embedded Linux is my go-to for esoteric applications, but many of the
BSD derivatives out there, FreeBSD and OpenBSD included, are
open-source, so it's possible to dig into those just as much as you can
on Linux.

For some applications, BSD may be ideal since the license is very
liberal: if you are developing some application where you want to keep
the sources to yourself, you're legally allowed to under the modern BSD
license. Under the GPLv2, you're obliged to provide the sources to
anyone you ship derived binaries to if they ask for them.

Are you stuck indoors as well? I will be here until June. I might as well
learn BSD as well.

I think most of the world is stuck indoors.

Easter long week-end, glorious weather, all national parks and caravan
parks closed… and stay-home orders by order of our Chief Medical
Officer. Sounds like Murphy's law!

Hello Andrew

On the other hand, the reason that I have the #BBAI is to play with some DSP on the C66x cores,

Why not use JTAG + code composer right to the DSP
You obviously wouldn’t have the Unix to DSP part for a product but you could play with DSP and sort out rest later