Paid Support for iMX6 Port

[Michel Kohanim]

Hi Russell,

Thanks so very much for getting in touch. Hopefully the experienced iMX6 developer will chime in. Again, I am willing to pay for services and then share the results with the community.

1. Would love to read your notes on Hummingboard. I am using Wandboard and Wandboard Dual for testing purposes and have been able to get FreeBSD binary image (from the website) loaded and functioning albeit it's way too slow even for rudimentary tasks such as vi (on the Solo). I suspect 512MB is not sufficient. Ultimately, I would like to be able to make a smaller image ourselves but have been having a hell of a time with Crochet

2. The ultimate plan is to use iMX SCM which is a chip with RAM already pushed on the top. This will reduce board size

3. I detest OpenSSL ... it's just way too bloated and I couldn't dislodge it from my running FreeBSD desktop (had to reinstall everything)

4. SDIO is not as urgent since we can use those little USB sticks for WiFi and Bluetooth (I have one attached to Wandboard and it works fine). This said - and if we cannot use some type of flash for the operating system - then we cannot use an extra SD Card since the main one is being used by the OS

5. RTC on I2C ... iMX already has an RTC on board. So, it would be quite shameful if we will have to put another RTC on board just because we cannot get FreeBSD to communicate with the internal RTC

6. NAND flash/eMMC ... our main goal is that - at the minimum - the kernel should be on a flash chip of some sort so that boot up does NOT require an SD Card. Are you aware of any flash chip that can be used by uboot to boot FreeBSD?

7. iMX6 already has cryptographic accelerators ... it would be quite a shame if we cannot use them

8. SATA ... may be an interesting option instead of using flash. The main issue is that our products are price sensitive and using SATA adds at least $10.00 to the BOM. As such - or unless I am mistaken on the price - SATA is not a requirement for me

Thanks again.


With kind regards,

******************************
  Michel Kohanim
  CEO
 
  (p) 818.631.0333
  (f)  818.436.0702
  http://www.universal-devices.com 
******************************

-----Original Message-----
From: Russell Haley [mailto:russ.haley at gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, August 2, 2016 2:05 PM
To: Michel Kohanim <michel at universal-devices.com>; freebsd-arm <freebsd-arm at freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: Paid Support for iMX6 Port

Hi Michel,

I have an on-going interest in the iMX6 family as well. There is a developer who is very experienced and knowledgeable on the platform and may choose to chime in, but here are my notes (in-line).


On Tue, Aug 2, 2016 at 9:20 AM, Michel Kohanim <michel at universal-devices.com> wrote:
> Hello Dear FreeBSD ARM team,
>
> We are in the process of migrating our embedded hardware/OS platform and have decided to go with iMX6 and FreeBSD (we currently have our own real time operating system). Due to the shortage of time on our side and ever complexity and instability of getting crochet to do what we need, I would like to know whether or not you accept contributions or other types of remunerations to help us with this endeavor. What we need:
>
>
> 1.       Minimalistic kernel and build tools/cross compiler
I can send you my build notes in the next couple of days. I am building and running a Solid-Run based iMX6 hummingboard (mostly from wiki.freebsd.org/arm though). Do you have a specific SOM you are looking at supporting? The standard src package and tool-chain supports iMX6 and specifically Wandboard and Solid-Run SOMs.

> 2.       Use Libressl instead of OpenSSL
Never done it myself but very keen to see it implemented:
https://wiki.freebsd.org/LibreSSL. Stubborn support for openssl still boggles my mind.

> 3.       Support for the onboard I2C RTC
I do not know the state of this

> 4.       Support for SDIO and especially onboard WiFi and Bluetooth on the Quad
SDIO is not currently supported by FreeBSD (so none of the bluetooth or NFC or SDIO wifi work), but there is a patch currently in the code review system for basic SDIO access via the CAM bus system.
https://reviews.freebsd.org/D4761. This is experimental at best.  A shame, lots of new low cost connectivity is starting to use this standard.

> 5.       Support for booting from NAND flash or eMMC
No, there is no support at this time. There is basic NAND support on one of the chips, but it has proven to be too deficient to be of much use (single bit parity, no use of hardware ECC and other major deficiencies).

> 6.       Enabling support for hardware cryptography
I do not know the state of this

Another one you have missed is support for SATA. It is not currently supported on iMX6 (although an all-winner bannana-pi has experimental support). Also, my Broadcom PCIe wireless card is not being recognized by FreeBSD on Arm, but was recognized when running PC-BSD on an Intel machine.

I would love to see any of these items pushed forward, especially SATA as I have had to start using Debian for my prototype platform due to missing FreeBSD SATA support.


Cheers,

Russ