FreeBSD on R-Pi and BBB: Odds and ends

[Hal Murray]

Thanks for all the good work.


The link behind FreeBSD 10.2-STABLE at the bottom of 
  https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/arm/Raspberry%20Pi
is broken.  My browser gives a popup saying "550 Failed to change directory"
Maybe that should be 10.3, but that hasn't been updated since late Jan.

There is nothing on the R-Pi web page that tells you that there are 2 
different packages to download for the Raspberry Pi: RPI-B and RPI2.  The 
RPI-B version doesn't work on the Pi-2.  I haven't found a RPI2 version for 
10.x  11.0 is working for me.

(As you might guess, I banged my head against the wall for a while trying to 
run the RPI-B version from
  ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/ISO-IMAGES/10.2/
on a Pi-2.)

Will the Pi-2 version run on older Pi-s?  Or would it be reasonable to make 
it?  Is there a good reason for the two versions?

The RPI-B version doesn't work on an A+.  It goes into a reboot loop.  I 
didn't catch the printout on the screen.  Poking an a USB keybord at the 
"poke any key" delay didn't do anything.

Neither the R-Pi page nor the BBB page contains the recipe (or a link to it) 
for putting the downloaded bits on to an SD card.  Yes, it's trivial after you know the recipe, but I think not finding that simple paragraph was one of my stumbling blocks when I was looking around weeks ago.  I forget where I found the recipe.

As a sanity check, it might help to include the output from fdisk/gpart to 
show what the SD card should look like and mention that on first boot it gets 
expanded to use all the space on the card.


Will user-land binaries built on one armv6 platform run on other armv6 
platforms?  If so, one set of pkg binaries could support several/all hardware 
platforms in the family.

It would be worth a note on the BBB page pointing out that if you get to a Linux system you forgot to hold down the button when you connected power.   (It took me a while to figure that out.)

Is there a way to tell a BBB to boot from the SD card even if the button isn't down?  I thought I saw that recipe once while browsing around the web but I couldn't find it when I wanted it.  It does stick over reboot commands, but that won't help recover after a power glitch.

Is there a way to read the temperature on the BBB?  I didn't find anything in sysctl -a


-- 
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