Installing OPNsense 16.1 on PC-Engines APU2C

PC-Engines have recently released a new computer, the APU2C family. In the user manual dated 08-JAN-2016, no information about OPNsense support is provided.

Booting the OPNsense 16.1 installer starts of quite promising (FreeBSD is known to work, after all), but fails miserably:

Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/ufs/OPNsense_Install [ro,noatime]...
mountroot: waiting for device /dev/ufs/OPNsense_Install ...
Mounting from ufs:/dev/ufs/OPNsense_Install failed with error 19.

Loader variables:
vfs.root.mountfrom=ufs:/dev/ufs/OPNsense_Install
vfs.root.mountfrom.options=ro,noatime

Manual root filesystem specification:
: [options]
Mount using filesystem
and with the specified (optional) option list.

eg. ufs:/dev/da0s1a
zfs:tank
cd9660:/dev/acd0 ro
(which is equivalent to: mount -t cd9660 -o ro /dev/acd0 /)

? List valid disk boot devices
. Yield 1 second (for background tasks)
Abort manual input

mountroot>

After some tinkering and some help from the FreeBSD documentation, I found a solution.

1. Boot using the serial console. Wait until the OPNsense installer menus is shown. It looks a bit strange when using GNU screen because all characters are repeated, but we’ll fix that.
2. Press ESC to get the loader prompt.
3. Now enter

set console=comconsole
set hw.ata.atapi_dma="1"
set hw.ata.ata_dma="1"
set hw.ata.wc="1"
set kern.cam.boot_delay="10000"
boot -v

The first line selects a serial console that actually works. From now on, you can read everything without seeing double.
I do not know which of the set lines are required, since I entered them all. I suspect that only set kern.cam.boot_delay=”10000″ is important, but I did not verify this.
The final line boots the installer in verbose mode.
4. Continue with the normal OPNsense installation procedure. When the installation reaches the point where you are asked to remove the installation medium and then reboots, you do not need to do anything but sit back and wait.

So far, OPNsense has been running without any problems on the APU2C. 🙂