FreeBSD on the Pinebook

[Emmanuel Vadot]

On Mon, 08 Jan 2018 11:49:08 +0100
Adriaan de Groot <adridg at freebsd.org> wrote:

> On Sunday, 7 January 2018 22:12:37 CET Peter Jeremy wrote:
> > Is any work being done to get FreeBSD running on the Pinebook?
> > https://www.pine64.org/?page_id=3707
> 
> The hardware is pretty much interchangeable, except for the way the serial 
> port works over the audio jack. The Pinebook is roughly / basically the pine64 
> board with some ports wired to the outside of the case. Linux images for the 
> Pinebook work just fine on the Pine64+ board after replacing the u-boot blocks 
> with Pine64+ versions thereof.

 Same for FreeBSD

> I could borrow a Pinebook and check that the Pine64+ FreeBSD image boots on it 
> just to be sure; I've got an audio-to-serial-pinout cable kicking around for 
> this purpose, but ..
> 
> > https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/arm/Allwinner shows the A64 and Pine64
> > are supported but there's no framebuffer support listed so I presume it
> > doesn't work (at least usefully) on the Pinebook.
> 
> . without video output, there's not much use for the whole thing. Note 
> there's just been a new binary-blob MALI 400 driver published on the Pine 
> wiki, who knows what effect that might have. (I haven't tried latest Linux 
> images with that new driver, getting the DRM blob to play nice with other 
> kernels is quite an exercise).

 It has nothing to do with MALI, MALI is the gpu (discrete GPU one
could say) and even with MALI support (which we don't have and, I
think, never will) we still need display engine driver (which drives
the framebuffer, hdmi, lcd etc ...)

> Basically I'd suggest getting the Pine64 to support video first, and then 
> worrying about devices using it -- something similar applies to the Rock64 
> mentioned here recently (although that's a MALI 450 GPU, which I think FreeBSD 
> supports on the ODROID C2+ .. gah, too many hardware variants running through 
> my head, I'll get coffee first).
> 
> [ade]

 I have efifb mostly working on Pine64 but our pmap code needs some
love.

-- 
Emmanuel Vadot <manu at bidouilliste.com> <manu at freebsd.org>