# FreeBSD on Mikrotik's RB1100 (MPC8544)



## modesto916 (Oct 4, 2012)

Hi,

I'm wondering if it's possible to get FreeBSD running (production scenario) on a mikrotik rb 1100, I noticed that FreeBSD fully supports mpc85xx cpus. I was thinking about cross-compiling it and installing on a micro-sd card. Does anybody know if it is supposed to work? Does it support MicroSD booting?


Thanks in advance.


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## SirDice (Oct 4, 2012)

Fully supported is not correct. PowerPC is a Tier 2 architecture.



> The FreeBSD/ppc port is still a Tier 2 platform. That means it is not being fully supported by our security officer, release engineers and toolchain maintainers.


http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/ppc.html


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## modesto916 (Oct 4, 2012)

Hi,

 Sorry, I sad that based on this page: http://www.freebsd.org/relnotes/CURRENT/hardware/proc.html#proc-powerpc

_All systems listed below are fully supported_

 Anyway, I just want to run FreeBSD on this board for routing purposes, as RouterOS in my opinion should change its name to BugOS.


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## modesto916 (Oct 4, 2012)

Hi,

 Sorry, I replied using 'post quick reply'. As I said, I read at freebsd 9.0-current hardware notes:

http://www.freebsd.org/relnotes/CURRENT/hardware/proc.html#proc-powerpc

_ All systems listed below are fully supported_

 That's why I thought it was 'fully supported' =)

 Anyway, I'm wondering how should I try to install it on this board. It supports booting from bootp, tftp, nand embedded storage and micro-sd cards, I was thinking about cross-compiling on another machine and installing everything into a micro-sd card. Any suggestions?

Thanks.


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## SirDice (Oct 4, 2012)

modesto916 said:
			
		

> As I said, I read at freebsd 9.0-current hardware notes:
> 
> http://www.freebsd.org/relnotes/CURRENT/hardware/proc.html#proc-powerpc
> 
> ...


I think in that context it means "it works", i.e. all functionality is usable :e


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## modesto916 (Oct 4, 2012)

Alright =), at least it's supported, I now need to know how I'm going to install it. Has anybody any suggestions on how I could do it? I was thinking in creating a partition schema on the micro-sd card, mounting it, cross-compiling, then installing it into the sd card, though I've never done something like this before.


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## ondra_knezour (Oct 4, 2012)

NanoBSD may be good introduction to the theme?


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## modesto916 (Oct 5, 2012)

Hi,

I've never used NanoBSD before, I could take a look at the documentation. But I would like to really see and understand what I'm doing, is it hard to cross-compile and install it manually into the sd-card? I've doubts with the booting process, I've seen people quoting about u-boot, is it really necessary?


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## ondra_knezour (Oct 5, 2012)

NanoBSD is in fact shell script, which do what you want - cross-compile BSD and create image of disc, which can be transfered to bootable media. So you can try to read, understand and modify this script. I used this script before and has no problem to understand what is going on from very first moments. However, from time to time, there was something not working as I expected, so little coding love here and there was necessary. 

I don't know nothing about Mikrotik PPC devices boot, but there are some documents on wiki about embedding FreeBSD, including u-boot. For notes and sources see
http://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/mips
http://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/arm
http://wiki.freebsd.org/EmbeddedHandbook
http://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSDMarvell
http://wiki.freebsd.org/FlattenedDeviceTree


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