Utilite Freescale i.MX6 support

[Pete Wright]

On Sun, Feb 02, 2014 at 01:55:50PM -0700, Ian Lepore wrote:
> On Wed, 2014-01-29 at 10:39 -0800, Pete Wright wrote:
> > Hello,
> > I have recently purchase this device and am interested in trying to get
> > FreeBSD running on it:
> > 
> > http://utilite-computer.com/web/utilite-models
> > 
> > I currently have the system booting fine with the provided Debian image
> > they ship with these system.  At the end of this message is the output
> > of dmesg from linux-land.
> > 
> > Helpful documentation is also available here:
> > http://utilite-computer.com/download/documentation//utilite/utilite-technical-reference-manual.pdf
> > 
> > From what I can tell Utilite has done a good job at being open about
> > their spec's and components.  Hopefully this will help get it ported.  I
> > am personally excited about the dual Intel GBE NIC's on this system and
> > would love to test this box out as an embedded router/firewall/nat device.
> > 
> > Is there a good reference I can start from for this chipset?  I am not
> > %100 clear on which guide I should be following.
> > 
> > Thanks in advance!
> > -pete
> > 
> > 
> > <begin Linux dmesg>
> > [snipped]
> > 
> 
> I'm sorry it has taken me so long to reply to this.  Until today my
> reply would have had to been basically "freebsd will only kinda-sorta
> run on that box," and every day I've been hoping to fix the
> show-stopping bug and have something better to report.  As of today
> (r261410) the infamous wrong-endian bug is fixed and I think you won't
> have too much trouble getting freebsd running on that unit.
> 
no worries thanks for the reply!

<snip>

 
> To get started, you should probably start with the Wandboard dts files
> and kernel config.  One thing that jumps out at me is that the Utilite
> uses uart ports 2 and 4, so to have a serial console for debugging
> you'll need to change the dts source to enable uart2 and select it as
> the console in the choosen {...} block.  Unfortunately, because it's
> Compulab, you'll probably have to buy their overpriced serial cable with
> the weird connector on it (they do the same thing on the FitPc2).
> 

thanks for the pointers!  i was lucky enough to have them include the
serial console cable with the box at no additional cost so no worries there.

i did create an image using crochet-freebsd using the  wanboard-quad
config.  it was failing trying to load uboot it looked like (no output
on console) so i have some testing to do on that end (and bug reports
too as well).

i will re-build the images tonight to grab the latest patches as well as
including the change for dts source as well.

since the box already has uboot installed on it i was assuming i could
just copy over the kernel image via nfs or tftp...so i will try that as
well.

cheers!
-pete

-- 
Pete Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org
twitter => @nomadlogicLA