Running FreeBSD 10.1 on the Raspberry Pi

FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE became available at 14 November 2014.
This is my experience with running it on the Raspberry Pi model B.

21 years of the FreeBSD Project

FreeBSD 1.0, the first official “production-ready” release of FreeBSD was announced 21 years ago today, on November 2nd, 1993.

Internet access gateway on the Raspberry Pi running FreeBSD

Sometimes we get an Internet access by wire but want to get by WiFi (some hotels do this).
Sometimes we can get an Internet access by WiFi only for one device, but we want to use a few devices (other hotels do this).
So, we need a device which will work as Internet access gateway.
Here is a description how to setup such device on the Raspberry Pi running FreeBSD.

How to setup Wireless Access Point on Raspberry Pi running FreeBSD

Usually we connect the Raspberry Pi to the existing network.
But there are situations when we need to setup wireless access point.
This is for example, when the Raspberry Pi works as server for accepting data from different devices in a location without a network.
Here is an description how to setup a Wireless Access Point on the Raspberry Pi running FreeBSD 10.

Transferring applications between Raspberry Pi under FreeBSD

There are no official packages repository and we need to build packages by youself.
But if we need to setup second Raspberry Pi or just change SD card with system we don’t need to recompile all packages.
Here is a description how to transfer applications between Raspberry Pi.

Second I2C bus on Raspberry Pi running FreeBSD

The Raspberry Pi Rev 2.0 has I2C1 bus on the expansion header, marked as P1.
SCL1 [BCM2835/GPIO3] routed to P1 pin 5
SDA1 [BCM2835/GPIO2] routed to P1 pin 3
But I2C0 bus is still available.

Here is a description how to use second (or first) I2C bus on the Ruspberry Pi running FreeBSD.

Changing i2c(8) utility in FreeBSD to work on Raspberry Pi

As we already know standard i2c(8) utility does not work in FreeBSD on the Raspberry Pi.
I have corrected source code of the i2c(8) utility to work on Raspberry Pi.

Real Time Clock in FreeBSD on Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi doesn’t have any ‘Real Time Clock’ (RTC) module, which keeps actual time.

This is not a problem when we connect our system to the Internet.
We can setup NTP (network time protocol) for updating the time from the global ntp servers.
But for stand-alone systems we need to use external RTC module.

I decide to use DS1307 Real Time Clock breakout board kit from the Adafruit.
It is compact and inexpensive.
Adafruit provides good tutorial how to use this kit with Raspberry Pi with Raspbian.

Here is instruction how to use it with FreeBSD on Raspberry Pi.

Working with I2C in FreeBSD on Raspberry Pi

Unix is well-documented system, but on C language

There was no support for I2C in FreeBSD-10.0-RELEASE for Raspberry Pi.
It appeared in FreeBSD-10.0-STABLE later.

Here is instruction how to use it with FreeBSD on Raspberry Pi.

Getting source code on FreeBSD on Raspberry Pi

After running FreeBSD on Raspberry Pi we can find that there are no source codes.
Directory /usr/src is empty.

Here is instruction how to get source code on FreeBSD on Raspberry Pi.