Getting started with freebsd-arm on Cubox-i2

[Brett Glass]

All:

I'm interested in experimenting with FreeBSD on various small and embedded ARM boards during the coming year, and just acquired a CuBox-i2 to work with. I downloaded the file

FreeBSD-11.0-CURRENT-arm-armv6-CUBOX-HUMMINGBOARD-20151217-r292413.img.xz

from the FreeBSD FTP server, decompressed it, and wrote the image to an 8 GB micro SD card from a Windows machine. I then placed the card into the CuBox and tried to boot it.

I was hopeful when the display showed a message from the U-Boot boot loader. But then a bunch of random pixels appeared and the screen went blank.

Where am I going wrong? I'll probably dig into the technical details of development for this system shortly, but right now I'd just like to boot a prebuilt image and explore... and I'm not succeeding at doing this.

Note that the CuBox *will* boot the manufacturer's "ignition" downloader, which in turn will download and flash quite a few versions of Linux. So, I know that the hardware is functional. However, their downloader doesn't offer a working image of FreeBSD as an option.

--Brett Glass