Getting started with freebsd-arm on Cubox-i2

[Ian Lepore]

On Sun, 2015-12-27 at 14:45 -0700, Brett Glass wrote:
> All:
> 
> I'm interested in experimenting with FreeBSD on various small and
> embedded ARM boards during the coming year, and just acquired a CuBox
> -i2 to work with. I downloaded the file
> 
> FreeBSD-11.0-CURRENT-arm-armv6-CUBOX-HUMMINGBOARD-20151217
> -r292413.img.xz
> 
> from the FreeBSD FTP server, decompressed it, and wrote the image to
> an 8 GB micro SD card from a Windows machine. I then placed the card
> into the CuBox and tried to boot it.
> 
> I was hopeful when the display showed a message from the U-Boot boot
> loader. But then a bunch of random pixels appeared and the screen
> went blank.
> 
> Where am I going wrong? I'll probably dig into the technical details
> of development for this system shortly, but right now I'd just like
> to boot a prebuilt image and explore... and I'm not succeeding at
> doing this.
> 
> Note that the CuBox *will* boot the manufacturer's "ignition"
> downloader, which in turn will download and flash quite a few
> versions of Linux. So, I know that the hardware is functional.
> However, their downloader doesn't offer a working image of FreeBSD as
> an option.
> 
> --Brett Glass

The video support for imx6 chips was just committed a few days ago and
isn't in the image you downloaded.  The cubox is likely booting just
fine and sitting at a login prompt that you can't see.

The cubox has a built in usb-serial adapter for the console.  Just plug
a micro-usb cable into the slot to the right of the sdcard and connect
it to any computer with a terminal program (on freebsd use cu -l
/dev/cuaU0 -s 115200).

-- Ian