Crochet is a tool for building bootable FreeBSD images.
It can currently build images for:
- BeagleBone
- PandaBoard
- RaspberryPi
- Soekris
- generic x86 systems.
- VMWare
- ZedBoard
This tool was formerly known as "freebsd-beaglebone" or "beaglebsd" as the original work was done for BeagleBone. But it now supports more boards and should easily extend to support many more.
The crochet.sh script can build a complete bootable FreeBSD image ready to be copied to a suitable device (e.g., SDHC card, Compact Flash card, disk drive, etc.). The script runs on FreeBSD-CURRENT, though some people have reported success running it on FreeBSD 9-STABLE.
Using the script to build an image consists of a few steps:
-
READ board/board-name/README
The board-specific directories each have a README with various details about running FreeBSD on a particular system. (Some boards have several README files in subdirectories with additional technical information.)
If you are looking at this on the Github web interface, click "board" above to see more about the boards that are currently supported.
-
CREATE a config file
Start by copying config.sh.sample.
The first line specifies the board configuration you want to use. The name here should exactly match a directory under "board/".
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RUN crochet.sh as root
$ sudo /bin/sh crochet.sh -c <config file>The script will first check that you have any needed sources. If you don't, the script will tell you exactly how to obtain the missing pieces. Follow the instructions and re-run the script until you have everything.
As soon as it finds all the required pieces, the script will then compile everything and build the disk image. This part of the process can take several hours.
Shortcut: If you only want the most basic build for a board, you can use this command without creating a config file:
$ sudo /bin/sh crochet.sh -b <boardname>However, if you want to tweak the build in any way, you will need to create a config file. -
COPY the image to a suitable device (SD card, disk drive, etc)
The script will suggest a 'dd' command to do this.
-
BOOT the image on your board.
Again, read board/board-name/README for details.
- -b : Load standard configuration for board
- -c : Load configuration from file
- -e : Email address to receive build status
- -u: Update source tree
There are still plenty of ways this script could be improved:
-
More boards. Crochet should be able to support any board for which the FreeBSD source tree can build a working kernel. The hardest part is working out the various boot pieces required. Look at board/NewBoardExample for explanations for adding support for a new board.
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Out-of-tree kernel configuration. Right now, these scripts assume kernel configuration files are in the FreeBSD source tree. I don't think config(8) requires this; it would be nice to be able to include a tweaked kernel configuration as part of a board definition.
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Package Installation. Pkgng packages can be installed using option PackageInit option Package assuming you have a suitable pkgng repository. Cross-installs mostly work; there are a few minor bugs in the pkgng tools that are being actively worked on.
It should be possible to support pkg_add for same-architecture installs, though this requires tricky chroot games to get right.
-
Swap. The script should allow you to specify a swap size and automatically adjust the disk layout accordingly. For now, we support creating swap files in the FreeBSD partition, which is easy and seems to work well enough.
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Support for read-only root and other more complex partitioning approaches.
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NanoBSD-style split-partition support. Ideally, this would be a "mix in" capability that users could request with any board.
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Improved support for virtual environments. The VMWare-guest option demonstrates how to do this. It should be relatively straightforward to add support for directly building Parallels, VirtualBox, or standard OVF VM images.