(re-post from alt.hacker, relevant)
looks like FBSD 11.0 is now RC1.
did a test download of the image for RPi (in this case, the older 'model B'). the file was 'xz'd so needed to use 'xz' to decompress. no biggee.
Once decompressed (pretty fast), I used 'dd' to put it onto a 4G SD card, something like this (on a Linux box, actually):
dd if=fbsd11RC1.img of=/dev/sdaf bs=1M
(note you don't write to 'sdaf1' but 'sdaf' since the image has the partition tables in it). Unplug USB adn re-insert after, and you get sdaf, sdaf1, sdaf2 so it was working fine - those happened to be the drive letters that the multiple SD card adaptor caused to happen, since it supports several card types, and each port gets a letter for some reason, oh well)
Anyway...
This resulted in 2 partitions on the SD card, with the first one about
17Mb, an 'MSDOSFS' partition containing the boot files [this is how RPi works, so you have to have that]. The additional 1.1G partition was the FreeBSD UFS file system with all of the necessary stuff already installed on it.So, I fire it up to see what happens, and one of the first things that the bootup does is grow the file system to fit the SD card (basically, rc.conf runs 'growfs'). Excellent! No need to do this manually.
Then, after 'a little hacking', I'm logged in as the 'freebsd' user. The machine name was pre-assigned to 'rpi-b' because that's the image type (an RPi 'B'). I expect the RPi 2 image will have a different name. So naturally you need to change this in rc.conf if you plan on having more than one RPi on your network.
basic information is here:
(the important part is the default logins root:root and freebsd:freebsd which of course you should change ASAP - I did)
images are here: ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/ISO-IMAGES/11.0/
next fun part was getting the ports, but of course the handbook lets you know how to do that [however on RPi the extract/verification process was extremely *SLOW*]
once there, you can install the 'pkg' utility from the ports collection, specifically 'ports-mgmt/pkg', and install packages as described here:
(note this process is ALSO really really slow, but hey, it's like a
400-something Mhz arm32 processor with 512M of RAM, so 'meh')also I discovered that there's an error in the package configuration file. the 'url' line should read:
url: "pkg+
and in /usr/local/etc/pkg.conf the 'ABI' line should be
ABI = "freebsd:11:armv6:32:el:eabi:softfp"
(so far this seems to work, though it may not be 100% correct)
of course, my OWN motivation for this is the comms/uarduno port, which was reported as 'broken' under FBSD 11 [apparently some header files have moved or something]. so now I'll be able to fix/test it without building and running it on an x86 machine, hopefully [and I'll be able to verify that it works properly on an arm-based system]. I did see a built package for it, so maybe they fixed it FOR me?
NOTE: if you're building ports on an RPi, and you need more space than the drive has, mount an NFS share to /bigdrive and do this:
make WRKDIRPREFIX=/bigdrive install
rather than just 'make install'. this should do the trick.
I also noted some minor differences in RC vars from earlier versions of FBSD, particularly the version I'm still running because I need these machines RUNNING and don't really have anything that needs patching on any of them (that wasn't already patched). but it would be simple to upgrade my old boxen if I can afford to shut them down for a bit to do so. Which I can't, not really. I'll wait until I have money to buy NEW boxen, then build them 'anew' like I did before, so I can keep the old ones around as 'beater' boxen. yeah.
until then I"ll toy with this RPi running FBSD.