FreeBSD under VMware ESXi ARM Fling

[Vincent Milum Jr]

ums isn't being loaded automatically. I'm not sure why. I've had to
manually add it to loader.conf to get mouse support working at all.

unrelated to vmware, a while back i was testing freebsd on a raspberry pi
competitor board (forget which atm) that only had USB storage. it would
boot to the point of switching to kernel mounting the file system, and
failing to find the USB drive. I now suspect that this is also related to
lack of *HCI (possibly specifically uhci), so I want to give that a try
there too sometime soon.

also, update on serial port. The vmware devs confirmed this is indeed
available on ESXi ARM. It was late last night when I tested just a very
basic connection, nothing using gdb yet. But this means we should have easy
kernel remote debugging access by linking two VM's virtual serial ports
together.

On Tue, Oct 20, 2020 at 9:56 AM Ed Maste <emaste at freebsd.org> wrote:

> On Mon, 19 Oct 2020 at 02:19, Vincent Milum Jr <freebsd-arm at darkain.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > uhci for USB 2.0 is not enabled by default. Ensure your VM is initially
> set
> > up
> > for USB 3.1 so the virtual keyboard and mouse will function. This is easy
> > enough
> > to fix post install with: uhci_load="YES"
>
> We can definitely add this one to arm64 GENERIC. It looks like we've
> just faulted in the various *HCI USB interfaces as platforms with
> support appeared.
>
> > ums is the same as above. ESXi ARM uses USB instead of PS2 for the
> virtual
> > mouse, so add this post install if you want mouse support: ums_load="YES"
>
> ums is not included in amd64 GENERIC; it's presumably being
> automatically loaded when needed. Does this work here too?
>
> > vmxnet and pvscsi are not pre-compiled. However, they compile and operate
> > perfectly as expected without any modification on ARM.
>
> I've committed a change to build these as modules now. We can also add
> to GENERIC if necessary.
>