Re: How to upgrade an EOL FreeBSD release or how to make it working again

Judging by a commit message BSD on the ARM Chromebook didn't work
when support was removed in 2019.

>RK* Exynos* and Meson*/Odroid* don't even work with current
>source code, if someone wants to make them work again they
>better use the Linux DTS.
https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit?id=9dfa2a54684978d1d6cef67bbf6242e825801f18

I have one of the "snow" Chromebooks.  The warnings in the web page
https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm/Chromebook led me not to try FreeBSD.
None of the many bugs seemed likely to ever be fixed.  I'm not using it
so I could try an experiment, but fighting with u-boot is not how I want
to spend my days.  Even the popular Raspberry Pi takes skill or luck.

(So "build an arm6 world and copy X, Y, and Z to the DOS partition
on your USB drive" is the kind of advice I need to supplement the old
Chromebook wiki page.)

There is at least a little value in getting it to work because the armv6
code is bit rotting and will go away entirely unless people use it.

John Carr


> On Jan 15, 2024, at 10:59, Mario Marietto <marietto2008@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hello to everyone.
> 
> I'm trying to install FreeBSD 14 natively on my ARM Chromebook model xe303c12 ; I've found only one tutorial that teaches how to do that,that's it :
> 
> https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm/Chromebook
> 
> The problem is that it ends with the installation of FreeBSD 11,that's very EOL.
> I can't use it as is. I need to upgrade it to 14 (but I'm on arm 32 bit,that's TIER-2,so I can't upgrade it automatically using the freebsd-update script. It is also true that I can't install 14 directly on that machine,as you can read below :
> 
> 
> <unnamed.png>
> 
> I've looked all around and I found the tool pkgbase,that I'm talking about on the FreeBSD forum,to understand if it allows the 11 to be usable or upgradable. It does not seem to be the proper tool to achieve my goal. Do you have any suggestions that can help me ? Thanks.
> 
> -- 
> Mario.