bhyve/arm6/amd64 query

[Tim Kientzle]

> On Sep 7, 2015, at 8:05 AM, John <freebsd-lists at potato.growveg.org> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Sep 07, 2015 at 03:33:24PM +0300, Jukka Ukkonen wrote:
>> AFAIK no. Bhyve is a plain hardware type of container,
>> not a hardware emulator like qemu, nor a jail type
>> container.
>> You should be looking for qemu or something similar.
>> Bhyve can be used for hosting other operating systems
>> on the same type of HW as the vanilla system.
> 
> OK, thanks. You've saved me the work of trying then failing terribly :D
> 
> It doesn't have to be hosted. The reason for me asking is, basically can I take
> the image and (as an image, not as an OS) can it be updated/recompiled on different,
> higher spec hardware, then returned to the Pi?
> 
> Hopefully I'm describing this right. You know on say amd64, an arm6 system can be
> cross-compiled as an installable system. That system is running. I have updated it
> (while installed on RPI2 hardware) and installed my configs, it works great. 
> Now I can unplug the microSD, dd it to a .img file, on another system, to archive it. 
> What I'm asking is, can I take that image while it's on the other system, and 
> interact with it to the extent that I can update/upgrade it?

In theory, yes.  If you could figure this out there are lots of people who might be interested in it.

The basic idea:  cross-compile a new FreeBSD system, mount the arm6 image and then cross-install onto it to update it.  This is very similar to the process Crochet uses for building a new image, except that instead of starting with a new blank system image you would instead mount your existing image and install over it.

Roughly speaking, the process should be something like the following (you'll need to do some research to fill in the many details):

  $ cd /usr/src
  $ make TARGET_ARCH=arm6 buildworld
  $ make TARGET_ARCH=arm6 KERNCONF=RPI2 buildkernel
  $ # ... mount the img via md loopback
  $ mergemaster <options to target the image instead of the local filesystem>
  $ make TARGET_ARCH=arm6 KERNCONF=RPI2 DESTDIR=<img> installkernel
  $ make TARGET_ARCH=arm6 KERNCONF=RPI2 DESTDIR=<img> installworld
  $ # ... unmount the image