# Bananapi M1 and hdmi



## myuser (Apr 30, 2018)

Hello
I have a Banana pi M1 - I installed several images of Freebsd Arm Bananapi ...
is it normal that the screen goes black as soon as it starts loading the kernel? Does Freebsd have support for hdmi or just serial?  Is it my problem or does Freebsd not support hdmi? Thank you and sorry for the English .. I'm Italian.


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## Phishfry (May 2, 2018)

It does support HDMI but I have had problems with the FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE images working on BPi-M1.
I can get FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE images to boot fine though. I was wondering if it was just me.

I have the same issue with Hummingboard image. 11.0 works but 11.1 doesn't.
The only thing I can imagine is there must not be anyone using these boards to complain.


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## myuser (May 2, 2018)

thank you !
do you think that you should use these cards without complaining or that, considering that no one complains, are little used?
I'm sorry but my English is precarious and I do not understand the meaning ...


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## myuser (May 2, 2018)

I installed Freebsd 11.0 release but it does not work. Black screen! I can only interact with the serial connection. It's strange because I tried different distributions (Fedora, Centos, ArchLinux, Ubuntu etc.) and all work perfectly, not only display the screen and I can login but I can also use Xorg Xfce, Kde etc..so graphical desktop.
Is it possible that FreeBSD has lagged behind? or have problems with HDMI on these cards?
The problem is that I could not find an exact answer ... if I knew that FreeBSD on these cards use only the serial connection I would avoid wasting time ...
Thank you very much Phishfry for your availability


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## Phishfry (May 2, 2018)

Do you have a working serial console on FreeBSD 11.1 with BPi M1?


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## myuser (May 2, 2018)

yes I have the serial connection, I have always used the serial with all the versions, from 11.0 to 11.2 RELEASE and STABLE. 
With the 12.0 have changed the variable fdtfile to point to the right dtb (first I had to do it manually ...) but then crashes: aw_ts0: AllWInner Touch screen controller ... I tried to replace the dtb file with other versions but nothing. ..


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## j4ck (May 8, 2018)

What are the specifications of your power supply? Have you tried any other power supplies with higher amperage? I had the same problem using BPi M3 HDMI, after days of investigation, I found out that it is related to low amperage power supply.


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## myuser (May 8, 2018)

thanks j4ck !
I do not think it's a power supply problem. I use a 5V 3A.
I have some news:
1) Using the image version 12.0 -CURRENT freezes: aw_ts0: AllWInner Touch screen controller ... I replaced the bananapi.dtb file with a bananapi.dtb taken from raspbsd-12.0-Allwinner and everything goes wonderfully. I've also installed xorg and xfce and it works great.
2) I did the same thing with version 11.2 but it does not work. So I also replaced the 11.2 kernel with the 12.0-CURRENT kernel and it works!

so surely the freebsd bananapi.dtb does not work.
while in kernel 11.2 something is missing compared to 12.0 .. but what?
Which device is missing in 11.2 which allows me to see the monitor in 12.0?


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## Phishfry (May 9, 2018)

RaspBSD is built using crochet. I noticed on the BBB that crochet builds a little different than FreeBSD Release scripts.
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/cross-compiling-beaglebone-on-amd64.64718/post-378014

Maybe loading the dtb different ways is giving you different results.


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