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Marvell’s Kirkwood is the platform behind the SheevaPlug and its derivatives.

FreeBSD supports Kirkwood, but its wiki article is fairly barren and only describes a diskless setup using TFTP and NFS to host the kernel and root. ARM as a Tier 2 platform receives no support, no official releases, and no pointyhat packages.

This page focuses on the Seagate DockStar, because that’s the hardware I own!

• Obtain a release or customize and build your own.
• Installation procedure on the device.
• Pre-built application packages by me with love :3

Caveats

FreeBSD can not access NAND flash, so bootloader alterations must be done within the stock firmware. There is also no way to control the device’s status LED. Mine blinks incessantly, but a fix is available here. Also, you’ll have to use anoperating system that’s been dying for about a decade, coincidentally as long as many BSD servers have been running without a reboot.

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