FreeBSD on ARM Cortex board [Was: Porting FreeBSD to Raspberry Pi]

[Ben Gray]

On 04/11/2011 02:51, Arnaud Lacombe wrote:
> Hi,
>
> [Starting a new thread, added Ben Gray to the Cc: list]
>
> On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 10:30 PM, Arnaud Lacombe<lacombar at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 10:05 PM, Nate Dobbs<misconfiguration at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 9:55 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey<grog at freebsd.org>
>>> wrote:
>>>> On Thursday,  3 November 2011 at 21:05:54 -0400, Arnaud Lacombe wrote:
>>>>> On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 8:40 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey<grog at freebsd.org>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>> On Thursday,  3 November 2011 at 11:33:25 -0400, Arnaud Lacombe wrote:
>>>>>>> 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 Please read what I said correctly, I said "this ARM11 is obsolete"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) ...
>>>>>> Clearly price is an issue for this device.  What's so bad about ARM11
>>>>>> that it shouldn't be used?
>>>>>>
>>>>> If you read my original comment, I did point out the $25 price tag was
>>>>> pretty much the only interesting thing. Now, what it has been designed
>>>>> for, multimedia, is going to be handled by a closed-source binary blob
>>>>> without datasheet, so let me turn back the question: what do you
>>>>> expect doing with it ?
>>>> That's not turning back the question; that's a separate question.  But
>>>> it's a good one.  I don't really see it as a multimedia device.  My
>>>> interest would be in little embedded agents in different parts of the
>>>> house, for things like measuring temperatures.  I'm sure lots of other
>>>> applications will come to mind.
>>>>
>>>> And yes, I'll probably use the supplied Linux port.  But if a FreeBSD
>>>> alternative becomes available, I'd certainly prefer that.
>>>>
>>>> Greg
>>>> --
>>>> Sent from my desktop computer
>>>> Finger grog at FreeBSD.org for PGP public key.
>>>> See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
>>>> This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft MUA reports
>>>> problems, please read http://tinyurl.com/broken-mua
>>> I agree with groggy, something I'd personally use it for is a small SSH
>>> server to allow a pinhole into my home network. It would serve as a very
>>> good replacement for the mac mini that's sitting in my DMZ simply handling
>>> connections for my SSH tunnel so I can bypass the proxy at work.
>>>
>>> Power savings would be significant and it would be plenty powerful to handle
>>> this task. A small webcam server comes to mind as well; there could be
>>> plenty of useful things I could think of outside the realm of multimedia.
>>>
>> you certainly want:
>>
>> http://beagleboard.org/bone
>>
>> $89, 700MHz Cortex A8, 256MB DRR2, micro-SD. However, do not expect
>> being able to run FreeBSD on it before a few years :)
>>
> actually, some initial work has been started by Ben Gray:
>
> http://code.google.com/p/beagleboard-freebsd/
>
> and
>
> https://gitorious.org/+freebsd-omap-team/freebsd/freebsd-omap/
>
>   - Arnaud
Hi, while it's true that I've done some initial porting work to the 
beagleboard and pandaboard it's not entirely ready to go. The port 
contains many hacks and bits of uglyness (is that a word?), anyway just 
a warning, you can take that code and boot a kernel but userspace tends 
to crash, which makes the whole thing pretty useless.  Also the code is 
written for the beagleboard and pandaboard, not the beaglebone, which 
contains a different lower spec SoC, however I expect a lot of 
components are similar and therefore I imagine most of the drivers could 
be reused.

The bright news - I was recently contacted by a bloke called Oliver 
Houchard who has picked up my code and started merging it into the 
armv6/7 branch.  Once that is done and debugged I think the support 
should be pretty good and should in theory work directly out of the box 
(svn).

Cheers, Ben.