bhyve/arm6/amd64 query

[Paul Mather]

On Sep 7, 2015, at 11:05 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?
> 
> *the other system is also freebsd11, but amd64*


I do something similar to what you describe for my Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black except I don't deal with it as a complete image.  I just work with the file systems on the SD card.

I cross build the system on my FreeBSD/amd64 system using this guide: https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/arm/crossbuild.  When I'm ready to update the SD card on the Pi or BBB, I shut them down and then mount the UFS2 file system on the FreeBSD/amd64 system.  I run make installkernel and installworld to the mounted SD card file system (mounted, e.g., at /build/sys/bbb) and also run mergemaster (e.g., mergemaster -i -F -m /build/src/head -A armv6 -D /build/sys/bbb).  All this is really just using the standard build tools, but with some extra option specified due to the cross-build nature of the process.

After unmounting the SD card, I put it back in the Pi or BBB and start it up again.  This method has worked without problems for me for a while, and I can build a new kernel and world on my FreeBSD/amd64 system in under 30 minutes, as opposed to the many many hours it takes to do it natively on the Pi or BBB.

Cheers,

Paul.