Michael's Daemonic Doodles

...blogging bits of BSD

Running FreeBSD on a Raspberry Pi3 using a custom image created with crochet and poudriere

I used to download images from raspbsd.org and install binary packages using pkg on the device. This has some disadvantages:

  • The image there is updated infrequently
  • Installing using pkg is relatively slow
  • Binary packages aren't always in sync when running CURRENT
  • Building things yourself gives you more control

Using crochet and poudriere it's quite easy to create an image with pre-installed packages, which helps a lot when provisioning a large number of devices. Packages are cross-compiled using qemu, which is slow, but still much faster than building on the device itself.

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