It has been a long time since the opnsense/tools can build ARM64 images.

While some find it troublesome to cross-build the ARM64 image from an AMD64 machine, I have always built the images on an ARM64 machine. Usually, I use a KVM virtual machine on my Radxa Rock5b, with the four Cortex-A76 cores of RK3588, 12G of memory, and pass-through access to SSD storage; it works like a charm and finishes a fresh new build in 20 hours.

This is a note on building U-Boot for Radxa Rock5b¹ and making it boot.

There are two versions of U-Boot for Rock5b; one is from Radxa (legacy version), and the other is from Collabora (mainline version, still under development but is pretty complete). Both versions can load bootloaders from SPI flash, NVME SSD, SD card, eMMC, and USB drive. However, only the mainline version can boot EFI applications like grub.

Happy Easter!

Finally, got some time to write all this.

1 Site Down

Some might have noticed that everything under my domain ‘yrzr.tk’ is no longer reachable, including this blog, my FTP site for OPNsense pkg, and my self-hosted gitlab site.

Long story short, as I have replied to your question from emails and on the GitHub issues page, My domain name provider, Freenom, had my domain status changed to “pending” and did not respond to my emails, together went down the DNS service.

1 1 Introduction

The NanoPi R6S (as “R6S”) is an open-sourced mini IoT gateway device with two 2.5G and one Gbps Ethernet ports, designed and developed by FriendlyElec.¹

The R6S is built on RK3588S, which has Quad-core ARM Cortex-A76 (up to 2.4GHz) and quad-core Cortex-A55 CPU (up to 1.8GHz), and 8GB LPDDR4X RAM at 2133MHz. It has 32GB eMMC and supports an SD card or disk drive through USB 3.0 port. And the charming points are the three Ethernet ports. Moreover, Friendlyelec claims² that R6S has extremely high encryption performance.

• These experimental images are NOT official releases. It’s a proof of concept that OPNsense is workable for aarch64. Use at your own risk.
• Since version 22, OPNsense is now based on FreeBSD 13. Therefore, all the devices on this wiki page shall all work under good development. Images for Raspberry Pi 4 and NanoPi R4S are built here.
• The OPNsense-${VER}-vm-aarch64.vmdk image works for ESXi and QEMU.
• The OPNsense-${VER}-arm-aarch64-RPI.img image works for Raspberry Pi 3b, 3b+ and 4b, while the OPNsense-${VER}-arm-aarch64-R4S.img image works for NanoPi R4S. See section 4 for details.
• For NanoPi R6S, please see my steps to make the device running.

1 1 Introduction

The OPNsense images for aarch64 are built on FreeBSD aarch64 using the tools¹.

• These experimental images are NOT official releases. It’s a proof of concept that OPNsense is workable for aarch64. Use at your own risk.
• As of version 22, OPNsense is now based on FreeBSD 13. Therefore, all the devices on this wiki page shall all work under good development. Raspberry Pi 4 and NanoPi R4S are added here.
• The OPNsense-${VER}-OpenSSL-vm-aarch64.vmdk image works for ESXi and QEMU.
• The OPNsense-${VER}-OpenSSL-arm-aarch64-RPI.img image works for Raspberry Pi 3b, 3b+ and 4b, while the OPNsense-${VER}-OpenSSL-arm-aarch64-R4S.img image works for NanoPi R4S. See section 4 for details.

1 1 Introduction

The OPNsense images for aarch64 are built on FreeBSD aarch64 using the tools¹.

• These experimental images are NOT official releases. It’s a proof of concept that OPNsense is workable for aarch64. Use at your own risks.
• Read this issue before the first reboot.
• The OPNsense-${VER}-OpenSSL-vm-aarch64.vmdk image works for ESXi and QEMU.
• The OPNsense-${VER}-OpenSSL-arm-aarch64-RPI3.img image works for RPI3b and RPI3b+ (RPI4 is tested not working yet bootable with a dirty image now).

1 1 Introduction

The OPNsense images for aarch64 are built on FreeBSD aarch64 using the tools¹.

• OPNsense 21.1.8 for aarch64
• OPNsense 21.1.9 for aarch64
• OPNsense 21.7 for aarch64
• OPNsense 21.7.1 for aarch64

Please visit OPNsense forum² if you encountered any problems. You can also create an issue if you believe I can help.