One of my old home automation boards running ebusd is still using Raspberry PI 2 B SoC. FreeBSD is still perfectly supporting this hardware, however, due to being a Tier-2 platform, binary updates freebsd-update are not supported. Of course, one can download the new image, but this will mean re-installing and reconfiguring all the software, which is time-consuming and painful. Also, the traditional “build from source” way will probably take forever on this tiny board and also could potentially destroy the SD card. So the obvious alternative was cross-compilation.
If you’re in this very specific niche – you’re very happy this guide exists.
From the article…
There is hooking up an an external disk via USB and mounting it on directories which are hard hit, I’ve done this with a RPi3B+, and it works well.
Works well as long as the external disk in question isn’t a flaky 2.5″ HD which is older then the RPi by quite a bit.
Anyway… Yeah, using my much more powerful x86 servers to compile arm packages is on my list of projects, so this is timely.
The article is nice and clean. There are details that would be interesting, like using “freebsd-update” to do the updates, but those are extra details.