Fwd: Paid Support for iMX6 Port

[Ronald Klop]

On Wed, 03 Aug 2016 00:16:55 +0200, Russell Haley <russ.haley at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> Sorry, reply instead of reply all...
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Russell Haley <russ.haley at gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, Aug 2, 2016 at 3:16 PM
> Subject: Re: Paid Support for iMX6 Port
> To: Michel Kohanim <michel at universal-devices.com>
>
>
> On Tue, Aug 2, 2016 at 2:39 PM, Michel Kohanim
> <michel at universal-devices.com> wrote:
>> 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
>
> Give me a few days, I just got back from vacation and kids don't sleep
> well during summer hours so I have very limited time right now, but I
> will get you what I have so far.
>
> <snip>
>
>> 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?
> It's possible to run u-boot from NAND and then run ubldr/kernel from a
> different source. It may even be possible to manually load ubldr from
> NAND (or even manually load the kernel from NAND in u-boot) but you
> would need to find an alternative for the kernel and rootfs,
> especially if you want to update your kernel ever. Not what I would
> call desirable, but I have *heard* of production systems running like
> this.


My Sheevaplug loads the kernel from NAND which mounts the rootfs from  
USB-stick. And does this for a couple of years already. I used to have a  
rootfs on nandfs(5) also, but nandfs is not stable enough.

# nandtool erase dev=/dev/gnand0s.fbsd-boot
# dd if=/tmp/kernel.bin of=/dev/gnand0s.fbsd-boot bs=2k conv=sync

Cheers,
Ronald.


>> 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
> Hmmm... at work we use an apacer solder on 2 GB chip that comes in
> considerably under $10 I believe. Not sure if a little 2GB chip is
> still available.  http://us.apacer.com/products/SDC4-18-pin.
> Regardless, there is no support at this time.
>
>
> Russ
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