FreeBSD on i.MX6

[#1]

Starting with a quad-core wandboard. Download a wandboard image

~/freebsd$ wget ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/arm/armv6/ISO-IMAGES/11.4/FreeBSD-11.4-CURRENT-arm-armv6...

Unzip it

~/freebsd$ bunzip2 FreeBSD-11.4-CURRENT-arm-armv6-WANDBOARD-QUAD.img.bz2

Copy it to a microSD card (assuming the SD card shows up at /dev/sdb)

~/freebsd$ sudo dd if=FreeBSD-11.4-CURRENT-arm-armv6-WANDBOARD-QUAD.img of=/dev/sdb bs=1M

Insert into a wandboard-quad with serial console connected through a NULL modem (1152008N1)

The root user has no password.

If you had an ethernet cable plugged in you should get a dhcp address.

A nice feature is that the filesystem got expanded to fill the SD card during the first boot.

root@wandboard:~ # df -h

Filesystem        Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on

/dev/mmcsd0s2a     14G    403M     13G     3%    /

devfs             1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev

/dev/mmcsd0s1      50M    260K     50M     1%    /boot/msdos

tmpfs              30M    4.0K     30M     0%    /tmp

tmpfs              15M     52K     15M     0%    /var/log

tmpfs             5.0M    4.0K    5.0M     0%    /var/tmp

Not much running other then dhclient(8) and sshd(8).

root@wandboard:~ # ps -ax

PID TT  STAT      TIME COMMAND

  0  -  DLs    0:00.01 [kernel]

  1  -  ILs    0:00.04 /sbin/init --

  2  -  DL     0:00.00 [cam]

  3  -  DL     0:00.00 [sctp_iterator]

  4  -  DL     0:00.04 [mmcsd0: mmc/sd card]

  5  -  DL     0:00.05 [pagedaemon]

  6  -  DL     0:00.00 [vmdaemon]

  7  -  DL     0:00.00 [pagezero]

  8  -  DL     0:00.04 [bufdaemon]

  9  -  DL     0:00.01 [vnlru]

 10  -  RL   128:27.66 [idle]

 11  -  WL     0:01.53 [intr]

 12  -  DL     0:00.10 [geom]

 13  -  DL     0:00.18 [rand_harvestq]

 14  -  DL     0:00.04 [usb]

 15  -  DL     0:00.04 [syncer]

259  -  Is     0:00.02 /sbin/devd

278  -  Is     0:00.01 dhclient: ffec0 [priv] (dhclient)

396  -  Is     0:00.01 dhclient: ffec0 (dhclient)

499  -  Is     0:00.02 casperd: zygote (casperd)

500  -  Is     0:00.03 /sbin/casperd

704  -  Is     0:00.02 /usr/sbin/sshd

705  -  Ss     0:00.24 sshd: root@pts/0 (sshd)

643 u0  Is     0:00.05 login [pam] (login)

644 u0  I+     0:00.13 -csh (csh)

709  0  Ss     0:00.10 -csh (csh)

729  0  R+     0:00.01 ps -ax

SSH Login

A running sshd(8) server is a nice convenience since it’s usually the first thing I install on Linux systems.

If you didn’t want sshd(8) running at startup, you would change this line in rc.conf(5) in /etc

sshd_enable="YES"

Root logins over ssh are not allowed by default.

To get in with root, you can do this

1. Add a password to root
2. Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config to PermitRootLogin yes
3. Then restart sshd.

root@wandboard:~ # service sshd restart

And you should be able to log in over ssh in as root.

Or you could add another non-root user.

Date/time

Set the timezone

root@wandboard:~ # cp /usr/share/zoneinfo/EST5EDT /etc/localtime

Since the wandboards have no battery backup for system time, we’ll want to start an ntpd(8) daemon. To do this add some entries to the rc.conf(5) file

ntpd_enable="YES"

ntpd_sync_on_start="YES"

And start the service

root@wandboard:~ # service ntpd start

Because there is no battery backup, the first update to the clock will likely be larger then 1000 seconds. This is too much of an offset for ntpd(8) and will cause it to shutdown. The ntpd_sync_on_start setting adds the -g flag to the ntpd(8) arguments to allow ntpd(8) to perform a onetime, very large update at startup.

You can remove the line for ntpdate(8). The service is being retired.

Static IP

If you wanted a static ipv4 address, you could make the following changes to rc.conf(5)

- ifconfig_ffec0="DHCP"

+ ifconfig_ffec0="inet <address> netmask <netmask>"

+ defaultrouter="<default router address>"

For example

ifconfig_ffec0="inet 192.168.10.21 netmask 255.255.255.0"

defaultrouter="192.168.10.2"

And then you’ll probably also want to add an entry in resolv.conf(5) for DNS. Here’s an example for my internal lan

root@wandboard:~ # cat /etc/resolv.conf

search jumpnow

nameserver 192.168.10.2

The ffec0 portion of that ifconfig_ffec0 entry comes from the kernel driver name for the ethernet adapter. You can see the name with ifconfig(8)

root@wandq2:~ # ifconfig -a

ffec0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500

        options=80008<VLAN_MTU,LINKSTATE>

        ether 00:1f:7b:b4:03:79

        inet 192.168.10.21 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.10.255

        media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex,master>)

        status: active

        nd6 options=29<PERFORMNUD,IFDISABLED,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>

lo0: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 16384

        options=600003<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,RXCSUM_IPV6,TXCSUM_IPV6>

        inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128

        inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x2

        inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000

        nd6 options=21<PERFORMNUD,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>

You have the FreeBSD on a i.MX6Q