Building RPI2-B (and RPI?)

[Tim Kientzle]

> On May 15, 2015, at 6:58 PM, Brian J. McGovern <mcgovern at beta.com> wrote:
> 
> All,
>  I've noticed a lot of progress recently on the RPI2-B platform, and
> I'm looking to get up and running. I have an image that was posted the
> list a week or two back running, but I want to get up to bleeding-edge.
> 
>  I've seen some emails about changes in the build methods for
> "supported" platforms, and IIRC, many of the crochet-supported platforms
> were impacted, as there were issues keeping things in synch.
> 
>  Are the RPI2-B images (and optionally RPI) still being built via the
> crochet tool, or is there a new method around for which I've yet to find
> the documentation?

Glen is building a new tool for use in FreeBSD’s ‘make release’
process.  That will be used for the “official” images going forward.

Crochet is still being actively maintained.  It is maintained
separately from the FreeBSD source tree so there are
occasional mismatches.

There are other tools around, but I’m less familiar with them
and will let other folks explain them.

If you’re familiar with FreeBSD’s build system and understand
the RPI2-B boot process (which is a bit involved), it’s not very
difficult to build your own images “from scratch” using just
a FreeBSD source checkout and the appropriate u-boot port.

Once you have a system running, of course, you also have the
option of upgrading it from source directly:
    $ svnlite checkout https://svn.freebsd.org/base/head /usr/src
    $ cd /usr/src
Read the UPGRADING file for instructions.  (Caveat:  This
requires a few gigabytes of free disk space and requires more
than 1GB of RAM, so you’ll need to configure swap space as well.)

Tim