Fixing FreeBSD 14 Boot Issue on RPi4

8 July 2025 · 1 min read · FreeBSD, Raspberry Pi, Config

Contents

After updating my FreeBSD installation to 14.x on my old Raspberry Pi 4 the system stopped booting. The problem is that the system cannot find the root filesystem anymore. It seems this is a particular issue with some older revisions of the Raspberry Pi 4 (especially those with 4GB+ RAM, like those ending in “B0T”) leading to MMC timeouts and failure to mount the root filesystem.

Fix

If you have an RPi 4 model with 4GB+ RAM, a common workaround is to edit the config.txt file in the EFI partition of your SD card. Add the following line under the [pi4] section:

1
total_mem=4015