Booting FreeBSD on Rock64

[Peter Jeremy]

On 2019-Feb-03 12:40:45 +0800, Ganbold Tsagaankhuu <ganbold at gmail.com> wrote:
>On Sun, Feb 3, 2019 at 11:46 AM Peter Jeremy <peter at rulingia.com> wrote:
>
>> I'm trying to boot FreeBSD from a USB stick on my Rock64 and running into
>> problems.  I've looked through the web and haven't gotten anywhere.  It
>> boots Ubuntu 18.04.1 off an MMC so the board itself is OK.
...
>Did you try to boot from network?

I hadn't because setting up a diskless/netboot environment is a lot more
fiddly and the posting I'd found suggested that the Rock64 was especially
fiddly.

>You can stop at u-boot prompt when
>appears "Hit any key to stop autoboot:". Sometimes it is hard to press any
>key at this moment.

I just hold one hand on the spacebar and push the reset button with the
other hand.

>You can set bootdelay to something not 0.
>
>Then you can do something like:
>
>setenv ipaddr 192.168.111.2
>env set serverip 192.168.111.1
>env set bootargs boot.nfsroot.server=${serverip}
>boot.nfsroot.path=/var/arm64 comconsole_speed=${baudrate}
>tftpboot ${kernel_addr_r} loader.efi
>tftpboot ${fdt_addr_r} rk3399-rockpro64.dtb
>bootefi ${kernel_addr_r} ${fdt_addr_r}

That leaves off all the server side steps:
* Unpack the memstick image (or similar) into a filesystem and NFS export it
  with maproot=root for the Rock64 address
* Edit the etc/fstab in the exported filesystem and update the root mountpoint
  to match the NFS-exported root.
* Setup a tftp server and copy loader.efi and rk3399-rockpro64.dtb from
  the root filesystem into /tftpboot
* Optionally reconfigure your DHCP server to have the appropriate filename,
  next-server and root-path config.
* Ensure the Rock64 is connected via GigE because it doesn't work reliably
  on FastEthernet (it appears to hang and stop sending NFS requests).

Having worked through all that, I did actually manage to boot into the
installer before running out of time.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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