Setting up FreeBSD on a Raspberry Pi 5
You will need
- a Raspberry Pi 5
- a microSD card
- a USB stick formatted FAT32 with at least 2080kbytes free space
- an ethernet to USB adapter
Steps to follow
Download a FreeBSD image for Raspberry Pi. Go to FreeBSD download page. Click on the link to "RPI (3/4)" (don't worry about it not being for the Pi 5). (20250207: use FreeBSD-14.2-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-RPI.img.xz)
Uncompress the image file with xz -d.
Copy the image to the microSD card (see Writing an Image File to USB). Plug the microSD card into the Raspberry Pi.
Download the rpi5-uefi boot files from rpi5-uefi downloads
- Unzip the RPi5_UEFI_Release_X.Y.zip file
- Copy the unzipped contents to the root of the USB stick. Plug the USB stick into the Raspberry Pi.
- Connect an ethernet cable to one of the USB ports with the USB to ethernet cable.
- Turn on the Raspberry Pi.
Known To Work
Raspberry Pi 5 Model B Rev 1.0 8Gbytes RAM I (PaulFloyd) have been using it for development work since February 2024, using FreeBSD 14.1 and then 14.2. Primarily this has been using ssh to connect from my amd64 FreeBSD workstation.
Known Limitations
- Fan runs at full speed.
- No wifi.
- Ethernet only via USB, uses up one USB port.
- Network occasionally fails to start.
Future Development
Unfortunately, since Feb 4, 2025 the worproject/rpi5-uefi GitHub repo has been marked as archived and read-only. Presumably that means that there will be no further development done there, and thus no more bug fixes or enhancements.