FreeBSD video console (vidconsole) on the Raspberry Pi

In the default configuration with FreeBSD on the Raspberry console messages are written on the serial console.

After a "shutdown now" one cannot enter commands from a connected USB keyboard.

I tried to enable the video console but adding

console="vidconsole" 

to /boot/loader.conf just results in an error message from the bootloader.

Adding:

kern.console="ttyv0"

to /etc/sysctl.conf does the trick!

Note that one still cannot enter input for the bootloader in the early boot stages. I have not found a solution for that issue (probably needs different options for UBLDR), you will have to use a serial console for now.

Booting a Freebsd image on a usb stick with the Raspberry Pi

It took me some time to figure out how to do this, but it's actually very simple.

Create an USB stick (or disk) with the Freebsd image you want to boot and connect it to a USB port on your Pi.

Create a small standard Freebsd image on a small SD-card and place it in the Raspberry SD slot.

Boot it and create as superuser the file:

/boot/loader.conf

with the following content:

currdev=disk0s2a
vfs.root.mountfrom="ufs:/dev/da0s2a"

Now reboot and your Pi will boot the image on the USB stick.

Note that when you create a standard image on the stick, that it will have two partitions. The first FAT partition with the firmware and config.txt is not used in this setup. The firmware and config is always loaded from the SD card. You can remove this unused partition (and replace s2a by s1a in loader.conf) or replace it by a swap partition or just leave it as it is.