FreeBSD support

VisionFive 2 （English Forum)
1

I spent some time this week getting FreeBSD to boot on the VisionFive 2.

See here for a script to generate an SD card image and instructions to make it work: GitHub - robn/freebsd-vf2: FreeBSD on StarFive VisionFive 2.

There’s no drivers for anything, so the serial console is your only option right now. Not useful yet, but gotta start somewhere! If you like playing with broken computers, maybe you will like this too :upside_down_face:

I’m hoping to get some rudimentary drivers going in due time. I’ll post here if I get anywhere interesting.

10 Likes
2

This is cool! Sadly im no coder and cant help but its a good first start. Would love to try FreeBSD for it.

2 Likes
3

Followed the instructions. Looks beautiful.

FreeBSD/riscv (generic) (rcons)

login: root
Password:
Jan  8 11:35:36 generic login[1352]: ROOT LOGIN (root) ON rcons
FreeBSD 14.0-CURRENT #0 main-n259905-231d75568f16: Sun Jan  1 07:57:08 UTC 2023     root@releng1.nyi.freebsd.org:/usr/obj/usr/src/riscv.riscv64/sys/GENERIC

Welcome to FreeBSD!
2 Likes
4

is this over UART ?
Are there drivers for Network chip ? Then we could have ssh acces.

5

That said, I’ve been thinking about trying to do something with PPP over the serial line to get a network because round trips moving SD card back and forth, reflashing and waiting for the root to load takes many minutes and makes driver development very tedious.

6

Is it possible to boot images over tftp similar we did for the flashing of the firmware?

Then you w’d only need to exchange the new files in the tftp folder.

7

It should be possible; u-boot has the network set up and is presenting it through EFI to the loader. I haven’t tried it though, and won’t be for a while - I don’t really have my network set up for it right now and its a distraction I don’t have much interest in. If you try it I’ll be interested to know how it goes!

1 Like