jpunwin/crochet-freebsd

Build FreeBSD images for RaspberryPi, BeagleBone, PandaBoard, and others.

Crochet builds bootable FreeBSD images for a number of popular boards.

This tool was formerly known as "freebsd-beaglebone" or "beaglebsd" as the original work was done for BeagleBone. But it now supports more boards and should easily extend to support many more.

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How to Build a Disk Image

The crochet.sh script can build a complete bootable FreeBSD image ready to be copied to a suitable device (e.g., SDHC card, Compact Flash card, disk drive, etc.). The script runs on FreeBSD-CURRENT, though some people have had success running it on FreeBSD 9-STABLE.

Using the script to build an image consists of a few steps:

1. READ board/board-name/README

   The board-specific directories each have a README with various details about running FreeBSD on a particular system. (Some boards have several README files in subdirectories with additional technical information.)

   If you are looking at this on the Github web interface, click "board" above to see more about the boards that are currently supported.

2. CREATE a config file

   Start by copying config.sh.sample.

   The first line specifies the board configuration you want to use. The name here should exactly match a directory under "board/".

3. RUN crochet.sh as root

   $ sudo /bin/sh crochet.sh -c

   The script will first check that you have any needed sources. If you don't, the script will tell you exactly how to obtain the missing pieces. Follow the instructions and re-run the script until you have everything.

   As soon as it finds all the required pieces, the script will then compile everything and build the disk image. This part of the process can take several hours.

   Shortcut: If you only want the most basic build for a board, you can use this command without creating a config file: $ sudo /bin/sh crochet.sh -b However, if you want to tweak the build in any way, you will need to create a config file.

4. COPY the image to a suitable device (SD card, disk drive, etc)

   The script will suggest a 'dd' command to do this.

5. BOOT the image on your board.

   Again, read board/board-name/README for details.

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PROJECTS

There are still plenty of ways this script could be improved:

• More boards. Currently, it supports Beaglebone, RaspberryPi, PandaBoard reasonably well and there is experimental support for a few others. There are a lot of other boards with similar concerns that could easily be supported. Look at board/NewBoardExample for explanations for adding support for a new board.

• Non-ARM support. The GenericI386 board definition proves this is possible.

• Out-of-tree kernel configuration. Right now, these scripts assume kernel configuration files are in the FreeBSD source tree. I don't think config(8) requires this; it would be nice to be able to include a tweaked kernel configuration as part of a board definition.

• Package Installation. I would like to support option Package for installing a package from a pkgng repository. Fortunately, the new pkgng tools (mostly) provide the necessary support; there are just a few minor bugs and small features needed for this to work really well: Ask on one of the mailing lists if you'd like to help extend pkgng to fully handle cross-architecture pkg installs.

• Swap. The script should allow you to specify a swap size and automatically adjust the disk layout accordingly. For now, we support creating swap files in the FreeBSD partition, which is easy and seems to work well enough.

• Support for read-only root and other more complex partitioning approaches.

• NanoBSD-style split-partition support. Ideally, this would be a "mix in" capability that users could request with any board.