Installing FreeBSD 13.0 on a Raspberry Pi 4, with ZFS root filesystem.

FreeBSD on the Pi 4 with ZFS root filesystem

As the Pi is now a Tier-1 platform for FreeBSD I thought I’d try it out.

There is an SD card image available for 13.0-RELEASE - available at https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/arm64/aarch64/ISO-IMAGES/13.0/ - download FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-RPI.img.xz , uncompress and dd onto an SD card.

Booting this on a Pi 4 works just fine, resulting in a running system with a couple of accounts (root & freebsd) with default passwords, and with some (presumably sensible) default settings.

IPv6 ?

Installing to an external USB drive

However, rather than running from SD card with possible issues as to the card’s write endurance, I want to install FreeBSD to an external USB drive. In this instance a SSD in an external USB-3 enclosure.