Re: Installing 13.1 ARM on SSD

Hi there,

Am Fri, Jul 08, 2022 at 05:40:23PM +0000 schrieb Wall, Stephen:
> I am attempting to install FreeBSD/ARM 13.1 on a RPi4 with a USB3 SSD attached.
> Steps I’ve taken:
> - Used Raspberry Pi Imager to set the board to boot from USB first, SD card second
> - downloaded and burned  FreeBSD 13.1 arm65-aarch64-RPI image
> - booted and run bsdinstall
> - selected ZFS
> - selected the USB SSD
> 
> Installation ran to completion, but when I reboot without the SD card, I get a “Firmware not found” error message.
> Searching the web gives lots of results for linux, but I can’t find anything for FreeBSD.
> Has anyone successfully done an install like this, and can point me toward some resources that will get me straightened out?

If I recall correctly, you need to once boot the RPi firmware from an SD card
with a specific configuration to burn a "look for boot loader on USB drive"
flag into the EEPROM.  After you've done that, the RPi can then boot from USB
with no issues.  You'll have to read the documentation of the RPi foundation
supplied boot code to learn what exactly to do.

Once other thing that bit me when I set up my RPi4B: when you set up a zpool on
an M.2 SSD mounted in a USB case, you might have to manually specify a 4k sector
size at pool creation time or accesses may later fail with strange IO errors.
This is especially annoying in that the error only seemed to appear starting
with the new ZFS code in ZFS 13, being absent when I created and populated the
pool on a FreeBSD 12 host.

Yours,
Robert Clausecker

> --
> Stephen Wall
> Senior Staff Software Engineer
> 585.924.7550
> [cid:image001.png@01D892CF.B3756350]
> REDCOM Laboratories, Inc.
> One Redcom Center
> Victor, NY 14564-0995
> www.redcom.com<http://www.redcom.com>
> 



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