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Date:      Mon, 20 Feb 2017 12:46:19 +0100
From:      Milan Obuch <freebsd-arm@dino.sk>
To:        freebsd-arm@freebsd.org
Subject:   FreeBSD on Pine64 experience
Message-ID:  <20170220124619.7f04ad6a@zeta.dino.sk>

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Hi,

some time ago I've got Pine64 board with 1 GB RAM. I decided to put
FreeBSD on it as I saw arm64 architecture being worked on. First I
tried to build u-boot, it worked somehow, but I was not able to find
out the way boot works here, and did not find much time to play
afterwards.

As I found http://www.raspbsd.org/pine64.html I decided to try it out.
There are two images, however, none worked for me out of the box. I
realised it was because my SD card was slightly smaller than 2 GB so
image does not fit in, but I just created gpart structure mostly the
same as was the image, just with a bit smaller UFS partition, copied EFI
partition as full device with dd, null mounted ufs device from image
and copied it to my newly created filesystem.

It worked, I can boot and play with it. I decided to try native rebuild
as a stress/stability test. It was a bit challenging, but basically it
worked. First I create some workspace on my nfs server for it, so I can
mount_nfs both /usr/src and /usr/obj directories. I know there is
plenty of space necessary for buldworld/buildkernel.

First trouble was our src tree is not yet fully equipped for buildworld
on arm64. There is no working linker yet, I think, make buildworld
bails out with request to install aarch64-binutils. I found it is not
possible to build it from ports because of missing linker, so
installing precompiled package was possibly the only option at this
point. It was not straightforward either, but after deleting md
filesystems for /tmp, /var/log and /var/tmp (they was not big enough
for some temporary file, and I decided to free memory as well at an
expence of slower access to files affected) from /etc/fstab and reboot
I was able to execute

env ABI=FreeBSD:11:aarch64 pkg install aarch64-binutils

which installed both pkg and aarch64-binutils packages. I know from my
earlier attempts to cross compile world for arm64 it was enough to
build world, but it was not enough for native build. Trouble was our
build environment is sanitized and aarch64-binutils package is
installed into /usr/local/aarch64-freebsd/{bin,lib} directories, so
they are not in path. I did not find other way to get it working
without too much fussing with makefiles et all, but simple crude hack
worked - I created links with

ln -s /usr/local/aarch64-freebsd/bin/* /bin

Nothing more was necessary for native buildworld/buildkernel to
succeed. At this point after nfs mounting /usr/port I was able to build
ports.

When trying installworld, it proceeded almost flawlessly, just at the
end following error was reported:

===> etc (install)
===> etc/newsyslog.conf.d (install)
===> etc/sendmail (install)
cd /usr/src/etc/../share/man; make makedb
makewhatis /usr/share/man
makewhatis /usr/share/openssl/man
<jemalloc>: /usr/src/lib/libc/../../contrib/jemalloc/include/jemalloc/internal/tsd.h:687:
Failed assertion: "tsd_booted" *** Signal 6

Remaining steps, make delete-old, mergemaster and make delete-old-libs
all completed successfully, with mergemaster being painfully slow
due /var/tmp/temproot being od SD card.

Now I am running newly built 12-CURRENT on Pine, I looks like it works
well. Just a small nit - my 'uname -a' now prints

FreeBSD pine 12.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 12.0-CURRENT #0: Mon Feb 20
00:47:55 CET 2017     root@tiny.dino.sk:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC
arm64

Originally it was 12.0-CURRENT #<svn revision number> - does anybody
know where this revision number is being lost? Could it be somehow
caused by fact my src tree was 'svn checkout'ed on another machine
(i386)?

Regards,
Milan



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