Re: Trying an install to a Raspberry PI5 unit

Dennis Clarke <dclarke_at_blastwave.org> wrote on
Date: Fri, 07 Feb 2025 22:33:58 UTC :

> On 2/7/25 16:09, Dennis Clarke wrote:
> > 
> > All :
> > 
> >     Today I will be trying to follow the instructions at :
> > 
> >         https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm/Raspberry%20Pi%205
> > 
> >     Instantly the instructions are not clear. Not at all.
> > 
> >     I will try to follow along but expect many problems for someone
> >     that has zero experience with the arm platform. Almost zero.
> > 
> 
> Copy the unzipped contents to the root of the USB stick. ??
> 
> What the heck does that mean? There needs to be a partition
> table on a USB stick and then a filesystem and what filesystem
> here? UFS ? ZFS ? ext4 for Linux?

Limiting this reply to the above paragraphs for the most
part . . .

The:

https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/*/ISO-IMAGES/*/*-arm64-aarch64-RPI*.img.xz

are compressed image files that you can fetch listing a specific name,
not a pattern. The uncompressed naming would normally match the pattern:

*-arm64-aarch64-RPI*.img

So, for example,

# fetch https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/ISO-IMAGES/14.2/FreeBSD-14.2-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-RPI.img.xz
# unxz FreeBSD-14.2-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-RPI.img.xz

produces a: FreeBSD-14.2-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-RPI.img

Such a *.img file contains multiple partitions (if GPT)
or slices (if MBR). It already has the file systems needed,
although the first boot may grow a partition/slice/file-system
and/or create a swap partition/slice. It can be dd'd to media
directly (microsd cards, USB drives), replacing the prior
content (partitions or slices). A USB example is:

# dd if=FreeBSD-14.2-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-RPI.img of=/dev/da0 bs=1M conv=sync

A microsd card example is:

# dd if=FreeBSD-14.2-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-RPI.img of=/dev/mmcsd0 bs=1M conv=sync

Nothing about the above notes is specific to the RPi5 context.
It applies to other aarch64 RPi* as well, including ones that
FreeBSD does claim to support. Other than the version numbers
that appear, it is nothing new for its general structure.

The *-arm64-aarch64-RPI*.img.xz references do make that content
aarch64 RPi* specific. Other appropriate name patterns that
involve *.img.xz names would be for some non-aarch64-RPi* context.

> 
> These instructions are madness.

My notes above do not deal with then updating the msdosfs
with the EDK2 files from:

https://github.com/worproject/rpi5-uefi/releases/download/v0.3/RPi5_UEFI_Release_v0.3.zip

(The first and only version to avoid causing USB DMA
corruption issues: do not use older versions.)

This activity would be RPi5 specific.

===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com