Porting FreeBSD to Raspberry Pi

[Arnaud Lacombe]

Hi,

[Please do not top-post.]

On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 11:20 AM, Nate Dobbs <misconfiguration at gmail.com> wrote:
> 10 year old core or not, the ARM is the worlds most widely used processor;
>
Please read what I said correctly, I said "this ARM11 is obsolete"
(even if still used, for sure) and "FreeBSD lacks critical KPI".

Concerning the first point; you want a nice ARM core ? take the
PandaBoard, CortexA9, dual-core, DDR2. However, porting FreeBSD on
this chip will be way more difficult, and nobody will do the work is
the next year or two (my guess).

Concerning the second point, Unix may be 43 years old, you surely do
not want to run 4.3BSD on the latest NUMA system, and expect optimum
platform usage. Someone has to make the damn code do the job. Even as
of FreeBSD 9.0, we won't even have complete NUMA support. I'm taking
here about a *mainstream* system architecture, not even a deeply
embedded and integrated system.

 - Arnaud

> On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 11:12 AM, Arnaud Lacombe <lacombar at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 9:58 AM, Aleksandr Rybalko <ray at freebsd.org> wrote:
>> > On Thu, 3 Nov 2011 10:22:22 +0100
>> > Lars Engels <lars.engels at 0x20.net> wrote:
>> >
>> >>> Hi Hackers,
>> >>>
>> >>> maybe you've heard of the upcoming Raspberry Pi, a credit card sized
>> >>> ARM computer which is about to get sold for 25$ - 35$ from december
>> >>> on.
>> >>>
>> >>> http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/302
>> >>>
>> >>> Hardware details: http://elinux.org/RaspberryPiBoard#Hardware_Details
>> >>>
>> >>> The first charge will be 10,000 pieces, so there's a fair chance that
>> >>> one can actually buy a board.
>> >>>
>> >>> If someone is willing to port FreeBSD to the Raspberry, I'd try to
>> >>> get one of the boards and send it to the porter.
>> >>>
>> >>> Cheers
>> >>> Lars
>> >
>> > Hi Lars,
>> >
>> > I seen info about Raspberry Pi, this is very nice hardware.
>> >
>> Are you kidding ?
>>
>> ARM11 is a 10 year old core, not much to be really proud with. The
>> only interesting thing about the Pi is its price tag, but as you point
>> out, if we don't have datasheets upfront, it's not going to be much
>> than a $25 paper-weight.
>>
>> Btw, do FreeBSD provide any KPI for hardware video "accelerator" ?
>> AFAIK, we do not even have such framework for crypto accelerator, so I
>> serious doubt there is any for video :/
>>
>>  - Arnaud
>>
>> > It will be
>> > fun to port FreeBSD on it, since I already have experience with
>> > Broadcom SoC's. But device have undocumented parts, so writing driver
>> > for it maybe impossible or very hard (through a lot of RE).
>> >
>> > Anyway, it would be nice to play with it.
>> >
>> > WBW
>> > --
>> > Aleksandr Rybalko <ray at freebsd.org>
>> > _______________________________________________
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>> >
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>
>
>
> --
> Cheers,
>
> Nate Dobbs RHCE
>