Creating armv7 MACHINE_ARCH

[Sylvain Garrigues]

Hi,

> Le 13 juin 2017 à 01:10, Russell Haley <russ.haley at gmail.com> a écrit :
> 
> In terms of Raspbian, I had assumed they were just supporting Aarch32
> across both processor models. Many of the drivers would be the same
> source if they share components so I would think it would be "simple".
> I didn't see anything in my brief look at it today to indicate
> otherwise.

As far as I understand, the VCHIQ driver, needed for audio and accelerated video on RPI, is not trivial to port to arm64 as it communicates with the RPI firmware which only expects and returns 32-bit pointers as of today (although they managed to hack around this kernel-wise for aarch64).

Last I heard, gonzo has some WIP 64-bit VCIQ driver, not tested it yet. 

I only have an RPI 2 v1.1, and as far as I understand, I shouldn't upgrade to RPI 2 v1.2 nor RPI 3 since our freebsd armv6 port does not support the cortex-a53 processor (I didn't know about that, just learnt it in this thread), and the arm64 port does not support accelerated video (with VCHIQ) which I require. 

Also, I cannot use another arm board because there are no Mali GPU drivers for FreeBSD (neither for Vivante btw).

Pretty sad to have to stick with my beloved v1.1 RPI2 if I don't want to cheat on FreeBSD :-)

Sylvain