Raspberry Pi

FreeBSD-based Raspberry Pi (3 or 4) image, built using poudriere.

Largely inspired by NanoBSD-embedded.

Poudriere will create an arm64.aarch64 base jail which will be used to compile the ports listed in pkglist. Then, it will create an image using the base jail and the ports.

There are two possible image versions, ZFS or UFS-based. As much as we like ZFS, we have observed that UFS performs a little better on the Pi as the base system.

The upgrade process for ZFS is a new boot environment, while for UFS is a ping-pong deployment on a specific partition. ZFS's boot environments can be kept as needed, as long as the current version supports them.

The system is mounted read-only to preserve the life of the SD card or EEPROM (in the case of a compute module).

As a recommended best practice, we currently keep the base system with a UFS file system, and external drives with ZFS (similar to schenkeveld10).

Create a new image

1. Create a poudriere jail with a GENERIC-MMCCAM-NODEBUG kernel

   poudriere jail -c -j rpi -a arm64.aarch64 -m git+https -v main -K GENERIC-MMCCAM-NODEBUG
   

2. Create a ports tree

   poudriere ports -c -U https://git.freebsd.org/ports.git -B main -p latest
   

3. Create/modify the list of ports to be included

   cat > pkglist <<EOF
   editors/vim
   lang/python
   security/sudo
   ...
   EOF
   

4. Build the ports

   poudriere bulk -j rpi -b latest -p latest -f pkglist
   

5. Create the image

   poudriere image -t firmware -j rpi -s 10g -p latest -h raspberrypi -n raspberrypi \
       -f pkglist -c overlaydir -B pre-script-ufs.sh
   

   If ZFS is desired

   poudriere image -t zfs -j rpi -s 5g -p latest -h raspberrypi -n raspberrypi \
       -f pkglist -c overlaydir -B pre-script-zfs.sh
   

6. Optionally, test the image

   qemu-system-aarch64 -m 4096M -cpu cortex-a72 -M virt \
       -bios /usr/local/share/u-boot/u-boot-qemu-arm64/u-boot.bin \
       -serial telnet::4444,server -nographic \
       -drive if=none,file=/usr/local/poudriere/data/images/raspberrypi.img,id=hd0 \
       -device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0
   

7. Copy the image to the SD card

   dd if=/usr/local/poudriere/data/images/raspberrypi.img \
      of=/dev/da0 bs=4M conv=fsync status=progress
   

Upgrade an image

1. Update the poudriere jail

   poudriere jail -u -j rpi
   

2. Update the ports tree

   poudriere ports -u -p latest
   

3. Build the ports

   poudriere bulk -j rpi -b latest -p latest -f pkglist
   

4. Create a boot environment (BE)

   poudriere image -t zfs+send+be -j rpi -s 5g -p latest -h raspberrypi -n raspberrypi \
       -f pkglist -c overlaydir -B pre-script-zfs.sh
   

5. Test the BE image:

   1. Optionally, compress the BE image created in the previous step

      xz -9 --keep /usr/local/poudriere/data/images/raspberrypi.be.zfs
      

   2. Start a VM with the old image

      qemu-system-aarch64 -m 4096M -cpu cortex-a72 -M virt \
          -bios /usr/local/share/u-boot/u-boot-qemu-arm64/u-boot.bin \
          -serial telnet::4444,server -nographic \
          -drive if=none,file=/usr/local/poudriere/data/images/raspberrypi.img,id=hd0 \
          -device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0
      

   3. From the Raspberry Pi, import the new BE

      fetch -o - https://srv/raspberrypi.be.zfs.xz | unxz | bectl import newbe
      

   4. Boot once

      bectl activate -t newbe
      

   5. Reboot

      shutdown -r now "Rebooting for a firmware upgrade"
      

Configuration changes

In order to save configuration changes, issue the following command:

# save_cfg

Configuration (/etc and /usr/local/etc) changes will be saved to /cfg (and /cfg/local).

To do

• Adapt NanoBSD's update scripts
  • UFS (Files-UFS)
  • ZFS (Files-ZFS)
• Test gunion(8) /cfg (unionfs works, but...)
• Incremental ZFS snapshots
• Clean-up pre-scripts
• Improve sample directories and pkglist
• Improve documentation