Running OPAM on the Raspberry PI

FreeBSD image

I have been building my images using freebsd-arm-tools on a FreeBSD10 x86_64 VirtualBox VM.

$ sudo ./build-arm-image.sh -g 32 -s 3 -w 256 -v svn://svn.freebsd.org/base/release/10.0.0 -r /src/FreeBSD/release/10

Note that if you have an older 256MB RPI then you must enable some swap in order to be able to build OCaml later on through OPAM.

You can dramatically speed the build up by adding CPUs. On my quad core I assign three cores to the VM then modify the build script in the Build From Source section around line 330. Add -j4 to each of the three make invocations.

Packages

Some binary packages are provided on this site, however, you first of all need to install the pkg tool.

You can do this by compiling it through ports on the RPI or use the following hack to bootstrap it (as root).

$ fetch -o pkg.txz http://andrewray.github.io/mirage-fpga/packages/pkg-1.2.7_2.txz
$ tar xf pkg.txz -s ",/.*/,,g" "*/pkg-static"
$ ./pkg-static add pkg.txz

Configuring pkg

In /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf

FreeBSD: {
  url: "pkg+http://andrewray.github.io/mirage-fpga/packages",
  mirror_type: "srv",
  enabled: yes
}

Installing packages

With a bit of luck you should now be able to install the packages provided.

$ pkg install patch wget curl rsync gmake

Get a list of packages in this repo with

$ pkg rquery -a %n

Installing OCaml

From your home directory

$ wget http://github.com/andrewray/mirage-fpga/releases/download/v0.1/opam.asm-1.1.tar.gz
$ tar xzf opam.asm-1.1.tar.gz
$ mkdir bin
$ mv opam.asm bin/opam
$ rehash

The wget command seems to require --no-check-certificate at the moment.

To compile ocaml

$ opam init --comp=4.01.0+armv6-freebsd

Wait a couple of hours…

github.com/andrewray