Using packaged base with FreeBSD/arm

[Paul Mather]

A recent thread on freebsd-arm concerned how best to upgrade FreeBSD/arm systems such as Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone Black, etc. via cross-building on a fast host (e.g., FreeBSD/amd64 system).  In particular, how do you actually update the SD card on the FreeBSD/arm system without physically having to move the SD card to the cross-build machine?  Various methods such as using rsync, cpdup, NFS, etc. proved problematic due to handling of special file system flags or the fact that a rsync/cpdup isn't doing exactly the same thing as installworld/installkernel appears to do.

So, with that in mind, I decided over the weekend to give the new packaging of base a try as a method of updating my 11-STABLE FreeBSD/arm systems.  I'm happy to report that it went very well!  I now have the build system I use to cross-build packages from ports for my FreeBSD/arm systems also building base OS packages.  I have managed to bootstrap a Raspberry Pi B+, Raspberry Pi 2, and a BeagleBone Black with FreeBSD-base packages.  What's better is that this is without having to move SD cards or wait for days as the system grinds through native builds. :-)

Congratulations to the PkgBase people!

For those who might want to try this, I basically adapted my OS cross-building environment (using the "mk" script from https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/arm/crossbuild) so that it also built a PkgBase repo:

--- mk.orig     2016-07-25 16:31:28.723973000 -0400
+++ mk  2016-07-24 20:43:45.278344000 -0400
@@ -9,7 +9,7 @@

 # First set all tweakable variables to default values before loading
 # config/mk.conf which can override any of these defaults.
-mk_arch="armv6hf"
+mk_arch="armv6"
 mk_insdir="$(pwd)/nfsroot"
 mk_jobs="$(sysctl -n hw.ncpu)"
 mk_kernel="GENERIC"
@@ -19,6 +19,7 @@
 mk_objdir="$(pwd)/obj"
 mk_srcconf="$(pwd)/config/src.conf"
 mk_srcdir="$(pwd)/src"
+mk_repodir="$(pwd)/repo"
 mk_ubldraddr="0x0"

 # If making a target that requires root privs, automatically add sudo.
@@ -49,6 +50,8 @@
     "__MAKE_CONF=${mk_makeconf}" \
     "srcconf=${mk_srcconf}" \
     "KERNCONF=${mk_kernel}" \
+    "NO_INSTALLEXTRAKERNELS=no" \
+    "REPODIR=${mk_repodir}" \
     "UBLDR_LOADADDR=${mk_ubldraddr}" \
     ${mk_mkargs} \
     "$@"



I added the "NO_INSTALLEXTRAKERNELS=no" because I want to build kernel packages for each of the different ARM systems I have.  For that reason, I have this line in my "config/mk.conf" file:

	mk_kernel="VIRT BEAGLEBONE RPI-B RPI2"

I placed VIRT as the first kernel listed on purpose.  I want it to be the default one.

To build my PkgBase repo, I have this script:

	#!/bin/sh
	mk buildworld
	mk buildkernel
	mk packages


After that runs, I have a "FreeBSD:11:armv6" repo directory hierarchy in my project "repo" directory (definable via mk_repodir in config/mk.conf).  I found the REPODIR variable by looking through the build system Makefiles.  I don't know whether this is the canonical way to define where the repository lives, but it appears to work.

It was then a matter of following the PkgBase project Wiki page (https://wiki.freebsd.org/PkgBase) to serve this repository to my FreeBSD/arm systems, and to add it as a "FreeBSD-base" repository to each of them.  I bootstrapped the systems using the PkgBase instructions.

Note that for the kernel I installed only the kernel package appropriate for the target system's ARM board.  So, on the BeagleBone Black system I did a "pkg install FreeBSD-kernel-beaglebone" to install the BeagleBone Black kernel package.  The big wrinkle here is that it installs it to /boot/kernel.KERNCONF, where "KERNCONF" is the kernel configuration file name.  So, in the case of my BeagleBone Black it installed the kernel files to the /boot/kernel.BEAGLEBONE directory.  So, in order to boot successfully, I had to symlink /boot/kernel to /boot/kernel.BEAGLEBONE.

As suggested by the PkgBase Wiki, I ran mergemaster after bootstrapping.  Unfortunately, I had a local /etc/src.conf that strips out a bunch of components, and so mergemaster got rid of some things it probably should not have (mainly in /etc/rc.d).  I guess src.conf is not really supposed to be used with PkgBase (i.e., the whole idea is not to install the FreeBSD-tests package rather than exclude tests via "WITHOUT_TESTS=yes" in /etc/src.conf).  When doing this on my other ARM systems I moved away /etc/src.conf before running mergemaster.

In my case, the initial bootstrap installed 400 packages + 1 package for the appropriate kernel.  I don't know whether this is an appropriate number: I was expecting higher, as I recall a recent thread on freebsd-current when a CFT went out for packaging base that stated there were over 700 packages currently.  There did appear to be a big catch-all package, FreeBSD-runtime, that seemed to contain most of the system binaries (/bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, etc.), and so maybe the 700+ packages had that split apart into many more packages.

I was nice that debug files could easily be removed via "pkg delete -g 'FreeBSD-*-debug'" or that profile libraries could be expunged similarly.  Having bootstrapped the system, I'm not entirely sure how granular updates are.  I know that I will update via "pkg upgrade" but upon what basis does pkg decide a FreeBSD-base package has been updated?  Is it the pkg version?  If so, I know I can always force an upgrade (re-installation of a package that is "new" but has the same version) via "pkg upgrade -f", so I'm not too worried.  (It's not clear to me how -STABLE packages get numbered.)

Anyway, I'm going to persist with this method of keeping my FreeBSD/arm systems up to date.  It has the big advantage of allowing me to offload the heavy lifting onto my powerful build server and still be able to update easily from the ARM client systems.  This looks very promising.

My next task is to figure out how I can get "mk packages" to sign the repo with my own key...

Cheers,

Paul.