Re: State of the freebsd/crochet project?

On Oct 18, 2023, at 21:41, Rahul Rameshbabu <sergeantsagara@protonmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 17 Oct, 2023 09:01:33 -0600 "Warner Losh" <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Oct 17, 2023, 7:44 AM void <void@f-m.fm> wrote:
>> 
>> On Tue, Oct 17, 2023 at 07:13:28AM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
>> 
>>> Crochet has no active maintainers. Most people have moved on to poudriere.
>> 
>> Does poudriere handle the msdos uboot *and* efi part when 
>> creating the image?
>> 
>> Yes. I worked with manu years ago to put all the needed metadata for the different boards into the ports...
> 
> It does but it seems to have an unfortunate caveat. It assumes that
> FAT16 is supported by all embedded targets. The Raspberry Pi 4 and I
> assume the Pi 5 as well drop support for FAT16

The snapshot images booted the RPI4B's that I have access to just fine
last I tried such. But release/arm64/RPI.conf and release/tools/arm.subr
which are used to build such uses (selective axtractions across files):

FAT_SIZE="50m -b 1m"
FAT_TYPE="16"
. . .
gpart add -t efi -l efi -a 512k -s ${FAT_SIZE} ${mddev}
newfs_msdos -L efi -F ${FAT_TYPE} /dev/${mddev}s1

FreeBSD release images are also build with such: efi partition
type and a FAT16 file system.

Looking at a (my abbreviation) RaspiOS64 boot media used to boot
the RPi4B's (official RPi* media content, not FreeBSD materials):

# newfs_msdos -N /dev/da0s1
/dev/da0s1: 523984 sectors in 32749 FAT16 clusters (8192 bytes/cluster)
BytesPerSec=512 SecPerClust=16 ResSectors=1 FATs=2 RootDirEnts=512 Media=0xf0 FATsecs=128 SecPerTrack=63 Heads=255 HiddenSecs=0 HugeSectors=524288

But it does have a partition type of fat32lba:

# gpart show -p /dev/da0
=>       63  468862065    da0  MBR  (224G)
         63       8129         - free -  (4.0M)
       8192     524288  da0s1  fat32lba  (256M)
     532480  468329648  da0s2  linux-data  (223G)

Do you know some specific RPi4B EEPROM content for which a FAT16
file syatem is not supported? (The EEPROM has the RPi4B boot
loader.) Or are you saying some U-Boot vintage is restricted to
FAT32 file systems for loading FreeBSD's EFI/BOOT/bootaa64.efi ?

Or may be you are referencing the partition type (expressed here
in gpart terms), instead of the actual file system type that is
contained? :

     efi                    The system partition for computers that use the
                            Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI).  The scheme-
                            specific types are "!239" for MBR, and
                            "!c12a7328-f81f-11d2-ba4b-00a0c93ec93b" for GPT.
. . .
     fat16                  A partition that contains a FAT16 filesystem.  The
                            scheme-specific type is "!6" for MBR.

     fat32                  A partition that contains a FAT32 filesystem.  The
                            scheme-specific type is "!11" for MBR.

     fat32lba               A partition that contains a FAT32 (LBA)
                            filesystem.  The scheme-specific type is "!12" for
                            MBR.

(It has been some time since last I tried it, but last I tried
partition type fat16, the RPi4B's boot from it just fine if I
remember right. But GPT is supported, not just MBR.)

> , so the boot partition
> needs to be FAT32.
> 

Not for the actual file system for any fairly modern vintage of
RPi4B EEPROM content or U-Boot that I'm aware of. I've less
certainty about the range of partition types, not having tested
such in recent times.

Is there a chance you are using so large of an msdos file
system that a FAT32/FAT32LBA file system is a requirement?

===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com