Re: Orange Pi 6 Plus works (15.1-RELEASE)

On 6/30/26 12:22, Adrian Chadd wrote:
> On Tue, 30 Jun 2026 at 12:05, Mark Millard <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> On 6/30/26 11:13, Adrian Chadd wrote:
>>> hi! do you have a recipe for building and flashing freebsd on the
>>> rockpro64 that I can try?
>>>
>>> I have that hardware here (as well as bananapi and orangepi coming)
>>> and I'd really like to get freebsd-head builds running on these to
>>> help people who keep submitting us diffs. :-)
>>
>> rockpro64 has snapshot and release distributions, for example matching
>> the patterns:
>>
>> <https://download.freebsd.org/snapshots/ISO-IMAGES/16.0/FreeBSD-16.0-CURRENT-arm64-aarch64-ROCKPRO64-*-*-*.img.xz>
>>
>> <FreeBSD-15.1-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-ROCKPRO64.img.xz>
>>
>> The images can be dd'd to microsd cards or USB media or . . . Booting
>> does adjustments, such as adding swap and growing the file system space
>> to fit the media.
>>
>> The bananapi and orangepi do not have such. But one can study how the
>> rockpro64 images are built, for example.
>>
>> Also, these are all UFS based last I knew. You may care about other
>> aspects as well. So you may need to specify more context about the end
>> result you are after if the releases and snapshots are not sufficient.
>>
>> So far as I know bsdinstall does not deal with the like of U-Boot and,
>> possibly, various things that go on the msdosfs.
>>
> 
> Thanks, I'll go look at the image building and see how things work out.
> 
> Ideally for doing testing I'd like to be able to netboot a kernel+dts,
> kernel+dts+rootfs, etc,
> without having to reflash the whole unit just to do testing/development.
> Since I've been asked to help figure out ethernet, switching, uart, etc code,
> I'd like to make sure I can do the testing without having to constantly
> reflash things and potentially brick.

I've no clue if the U-Boot's involved support the likes of httpboot for
the loader.efi , the loader.conf , and a root file system image to be
loaded in RAM. My only example of such was via EDK2 UEFI/ACPI based on a
RPi4. Unfortunately, the FreeBSD OS does not have a ACPI driver for the
built-in Ethernet's ACPI interfacing, so I could not get as far as a NFS
based root mount. EDK2 does not support USB Ethernet dongles. The
FreeBSD OS NFS root mounts do not deal with that such networking
configuration: it has to be pre-established. It turned out that iPXE (in
snp.efi form) was not required for what I did but I did build and test
if I could get snp.efi going via httpboot.

The EDK2 was on a microsd card. My guess is that unless the system has a
builting UEFI/ACPI or UEFI/DeviceTree pre-supplied, You would have to
establish one of the U-Boot/EDK2/... as context. It might not need to be
a microsd card for holding such.

Otherwise I've not tried any network boots involving DHCP, TFTP, iPXE
(snp or not), or PXE for anything.

The RPi5 C1 stepping and D0 stepping EDK2's may get updates to allow
such httpboot activity. (My RPi4 experiment was to see if I possibly
could do a basic test for the 2 RPi5's that I have access to.) But it is
not obvious that those are any more likely to get FreeBSD OS ACPI
drivers to match than the RPi4 turned out to be.

> 
> Thanks!
> 
> 
> 
> -adrian
> 
> 


-- 
===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com