2016-01-01

NetBSD 7.0 working on the Raspberry Pi Zero

The NetBSD Wiki has a nice page about Raspberry Pi support, including instructions for finding a nightly snapshot image for Raspberry Pi SBCs.

Trying to boot the latest snapshot (201512311300Z) on my Pi Zero resulted in 8 flashes of the OK/ACT LED (bootcode.bin and/or start.elf problems, according to the documentation). This image boots fine on my Pi B+ and Pi 2.

I over-wrote bootcode.bin, start.elf and start_cd.elf on the freshly imaged NetBSD SD card from the version on my Pi Zero Lapdock (installed from a recent Arch Linux image. NetBSD 7 now boots on the Raspberry Pi Zero. I don't know if these are exactly the correct files, but I suspect they likely require updating in the NetBSD base image.

I've included MD5 sums of the files for your convenience: From the NetBSD Image: 
MD5 (bootcode.bin) = 9a4ad6a12ad7dc1aae279888c25d2252 
MD5 (start.elf) = a2c4b9ea3ae986f88ea01e05bef46904 
MD5 (start_cd.elf) = 85924312c9b51d1ef5b7ca301bb18d54

Files I copied over from Arch Linux that make it bootable: 
MD5 (bootcode.bin) = 6cc6560c0178c10928d14b8768969dab 
MD5 (start.elf) = f5b2a422d863efe5d47b1ac291ccaa3a 
MD5 (start_cd.elf) = f0dfc1462c5d9b003b64428fd52406ed

(I posted a variant of this as a comment on the NetBSD wiki. It hasn't shown up yet. It likely requires approval)

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