As far as I know installation to the rpi5 ist only possible onto the sd card and via a serial connection. My way was as follows:
- write the miniroot78.img to the sd card. - establish a serial connection using the debug uart of the rpi5, not the GPIO uart. - install the / system to the sd card, all other partitions on the NVME ssd. - after (or maybe before) the installation enter the u-boot for a small modification: "setenv bootdelay -2" and "saveenv". - finally create a boot.conf file under /etc with a single line: "set tty fb0" - You now have a running OpenBSD which boots into the HDMI, having / on the sd and the rest on the NVME. That works perfect on all of my 4 rpi5. May OpenBSD current (7.9) offers other options, but this I have not ried yet. Regards Berni On Wed, 1 Apr 2026 16:28:23 +0100 void <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > I have a rpi4/8GB installed with openbsd which runs fine. I've been trying the > same installation method [1] with a rpi5/16GB machine using install78.img > (have also tried install79.img) and the boot process gets as far as > showing the blue and tan u-boot image in the top right of the screen > and that's it. The message > > OpenBSD BOOTAA64 boot> > > never apears, so cannot proceed with the installation. > > (I'd also like to see it appear in order to set tty fb0 temporarily as > have no spare serial cable right this minute) > > As far as I'm aware there is no https://github.com/pftf/RPi4 equivalent > for rpi5, so can't replace what's in the msdos part of the install img with > that. > > The machine has been configured via raspi-config to boot from usb/nvme first > then try microsd. I have tried with install79.img as well, same results. > > The only thing I've not tried so far is booting an image written to > microsd but this wasn't the method i used for the pi4 (for some reason I'm > remembering it was a requirement to boot the installation media from > usb. Might be misremembering though). > > [1] write the image to a usb key and boot from it. > > Is there something more I need to do to the install media to get the rpi5 to > boot? > > thanks in advance for advice, > -- > -- Bernhard Ernst <[email protected]>
