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

The ARM Chromebook is based on armv7,it is still recent. But let's change
perspective for a moment,don't think about the ARM Chromebook. My question
is : how to upgrade FreeBSD when it goes EOL. I ask this because there is a
huge difference here between FreeBSD and Linux. Today if you need to use ,
for example Ubuntu 14.0, you can use it as is. Yes,there will be a lot of
bugs,but it will work without crashes. But if you want to use an old
FreeBSD system,nothing will work for you. So,do you know some methods to
install even packages or ports ? You know,there are cases when you need to
do some experiments so that you can keep your machine off the internet,so
you aren't scared that someone can compromise it. Totally prohibiting the
users to use an old system,removing ports and packages is not a choice that
I approve of. And I'm not the only one that thinks like this.

On Mon, Jan 15, 2024 at 5:21 PM John F Carr <jfc@mit.edu> wrote:

> 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
>
> I have one of the "snow" Chromebooks.  The warnings in the web page
> https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm/Chromebook led me not to try FreeBSD.
> None of the many bugs seemed likely to ever be fixed.  I'm not using it
> so I could try an experiment, but fighting with u-boot is not how I want
> to spend my days.  Even the popular Raspberry Pi takes skill or luck.
>
> (So "build an arm6 world and copy X, Y, and Z to the DOS partition
> on your USB drive" is the kind of advice I need to supplement the old
> Chromebook wiki page.)
>
> There is at least a little value in getting it to work because the armv6
> code is bit rotting and will go away entirely unless people use it.
>
> John Carr
>
>
> > 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.
>
>

-- 
Mario.