Trying to boot an Orange Pi Zero2
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Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2024 17:17:46 UTC
I have been trying to get FreeBSD onto an Orange Pi Zero 2. I can't even get as far as a U-Boot banner. Nothing comes through the serial port. A Linux image boots just fine using the serial port. Linux uses MBR instead of GPT and has a different boot environment with a lot of scripts. From reading old documentation at wiki.freebsd.org it seems like I should 1. Get an image for a 64 bit ARM SBC and write it to a card. I tried both https://download.freebsd.org/releases/arm64/aarch64/ISO-IMAGES/14.0/FreeBSD-14.0-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-PINE64-LTS.img.xz https://download.freebsd.org/releases/arm64/aarch64/ISO-IMAGES/14.0/FreeBSD-14.0-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-RPI.img.xz 2. Make a new u-boot slave port with MODEL= orangepi-zero2 BOARD_CONFIG= orangepi_zero2_defconfig FAMILY= allwinner64 3. Run the dd command from https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm/Allwinner/booting to install the u-boot image at offset 128k in the SD card. I verified that the alternative address 8k has a long run of zero bytes. 4. Copy sun50i-h616-orangepi-zero2.dtb from the Linux image that works to the dtb directories on the FreeBSD image FAT and UFS partitions. I power up the Orange Pi and nothing happens. It's failing to load u-boot or else u-boot can't find the serial port. The quality of kernel support for the Allwinner H616 doesn't matter here. I see no sign that the boot process gets as far as the FreeBSD loader. What went wrong? (If you know what went wrong, consider updating wiki.freebsd.org to save the next victim.) Is debugging with JTAG an option on this board? If anybody on this list edits the online documentation, wiki or www, it would be nice to have a list of what ARM SBCs "just work". I remember one of the Raspberry Pis worked for me a few years ago. A slightly different configuration wouldn't have worked. You needed less than 3 GB RAM and a certain board revision and you had to get lucky with the version of U-Boot that was on the releng-built image.