Re: How to upgrade an EOL FreeBSD release or how to make it working again

From: Dave Cottlehuber <dch_at_skunkwerks.at>
Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2024 16:44:36 UTC
On Mon, 15 Jan 2024, at 16:21, John F Carr wrote:
>> On Jan 15, 2024, at 10:59, Mario Marietto <marietto2008@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Hello to everyone.
>> 
>> I'm trying to install FreeBSD 14 natively on my ARM Chromebook model xe303c12 ; I've found only one tutorial that teaches how to do that,that's it :
>> 
>> https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm/Chromebook
>> 
>> The problem is that it ends with the installation of FreeBSD 11,that's very EOL.
>> I can't use it as is. I need to upgrade it to 14 (but I'm on arm 32 bit,that's TIER-2,so I can't upgrade it automatically using the freebsd-update script. It is also true that I can't install 14 directly on that machine,as you can read below :
>> 
>> 
>> <unnamed.png>
>> 
>> I've looked all around and I found the tool pkgbase,that I'm talking about on the FreeBSD forum,to understand if it allows the 11 to be usable or upgradable. It does not seem to be the proper tool to achieve my goal. Do you have any suggestions that can help me ? Thanks.
>> 
>> -- 
>> Mario.
> Judging by a commit message BSD on the ARM Chromebook didn't work
> when support was removed in 2019.
>
>>RK* Exynos* and Meson*/Odroid* don't even work with current
>>source code, if someone wants to make them work again they
>>better use the Linux DTS.
> https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit?id=9dfa2a54684978d1d6cef67bbf6242e825801f18

Hi Mario,

It would be great to know if it's still possible to build & run for this hardware,
from John's comments perhaps not.

I would at least see if you can get 11.0-RELEASE onto it, and from there try a more
recent 12.x release.

One option is to do a build on a new fast box (you can crossbuild amd64 -> arm) and
either:

- mount /usr/obj and /usr/src over NFS and just do the install

or:

- make a release tarball and then use bsdinstall on the arm chromebook directly

cd /usr/src/release
make -DNOPORTS -DNOSRC -DNOTEST -s ftp

See https://man.freebsd.org/release for explanation of ftp and other targets.

Notable mention, beinstall.sh is really nice, but only if you have zfs. Not this chromebook :-(

https://man.freebsd.org/beinstall.sh

If you manage to get something working -- or not, please update the wiki with your experiences.

A+
Dave