Hewwo OwO~nyaaa~~!!
(alright, I’ll stop that)
I bought myself a Raspberry Pi 4 (TIFC00091-2) almost half a year ago with the intent of working on some personal projects. Unfortunately, life got in the way and aside from me buying it, placing a passive metal heatsink on it and running Manjaro KDE off it once, I didn’t do much.
I’d say it was an okay experience, realized that my power supply wasn’t powerful enough and bought the official power supply from Amazon but otherwise, it was a computer. 11/10.
Now, I’ve been having some more time on my hands and I’ve been wanting to use my RPi for more “esoteric” projects. I’ve been wanting to daily drive a BSD-like operating system and do kernel and driver development on it as an exercise in learning about low level systems (also because I want to daily drive GNUStep and do stuff without risking my work^TM machine)
(I’m giving the model numbers for everything in case I’ve fucked up because I bought the wrong stuff)
So, I go on to download FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE and, unpack the xz archive with unxz
and dd if=...
'd it onto my known-good SanDisk SDSQXA1-128G-GN6MN (I’m using my SDDR-A631-GNGNN for this).
FreeBSD does two things, runs sshd
by default with password authentication enabled (source) and the default config.txt
reads like this…
init_uart_clock=3000000
enable_uart=1
kernel=u-boot.bin
kernel7=u-boot.bin
dtoverlay=mmc
So, I should be able to communicate with FreeBSD via serial using pins 5VO
, GND
, TXDO
and RXDO
with my PL2303TA (I’m using Cutecom) and connect via SSH.
But, nothing shows up. When I connect the RPi to the serial adapter, it for some reason has both red and green indicators glow. I don’t think much of it and then plug in the power cable.
Nothing, no serial output.
So I figure serial is funky and abandon it, connect my Ethernet cable wired directly to my router, unplug and replug the power cable and see what happens. After using an IP Scanner a few times and seeing nothing, I got fed up.
I unplugged everything, connected only power and mini-HDMI to my monitor and saw that there was nothing.
So, the problem might just be FreeBSD. I go to their website and of course, I’m supposed to use a FreeBSD 14 snapshot because…
The u-boot.bin used when creating 13.0-RELEASE image was too old to support newer RPi4 hardware revision. (source)
So, I do exactly that, download 14.0-CURRENT-20220407 (the latest during the writing of this post), dd
'd it and tried again. Nothing. No serial, no video output, no SSH (or DHCP registration for that matter, checked with my router).
Then I tried OpenBSD 7.0 as to the best of my knowledge, they seem to have relatively complete support for it (source). Same problem.
Now I’m thinking my RPi might have breathed its last and so I download Raspberry Pi OS (64-bit) and tried booting it up again. No serial, no video but it does register on my router and an IP scan shows that the device exists.
Where do I go from here? What BSD works best with Raspberry Pi 4? This doesn’t seem like RPi problem but more a FreeBSD/OpenBSD problem but I’m a novice to the platform so I’m not sure if that’s the case.
Are there any resources you’d recommend to someone who is trying to use not-Linux on an ARM SBC?