FreeBSD for new SOC

From: Sleep Walker <s199p.wa1k9r_at_gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2021 11:21:53 UTC
Hello FreeBSD ARM community!

I would like to discuss one issue.

A lot of devices have already been sold in the world on Amlogic processors.
These are SBCs and VIDEO consoles.
But they all run on Andriod or Linux. No FreeBSD support ;-).

If it had been, the user community would have grown a lot, FreeBSD would
have grown in popularity, and the number of testers and committers would
have increased.
This would make FreeBSD for ARM even more stable.

What are your thoughts on porting FreeBSD to Amlogic?
Such attempts have been made before
https://github.com/tomtor/image-freebsd-c2
NetBSD supports multiple SBCs on Amlogic
http://www.armbsd.org/arm/
Why don't we add this support too?

I know several Chinese manufacturers who would be happy to send samples
of their products to developers.

I recently received a RADXA ZERO on Amlogic S905Y2 as a free samples
https://wiki.radxa.com/Zero/hardware
https://forum.radxa.com/t/introduce-the-radxa-zero/6550

It is a very interesting and tiny device, it comes with Android
pre-installed on eMMC,
not even Mainline Linux support yet.

I've been studying FreeBSD for ARM for two years now and really want to
learn
add support for new SOCs to FreeBSD.

I now have 3 SOCs to add
1) Pine64 Quartz64,
2) Radxa Zero
3) First Russian ARM SOC - BAIKAL-M
https://www.baikalelectronics.com/products/338/

In all three variants, I have the necessary equipment.
And I have a great desire to learn.

I have already written a USB driver for BAIKAL-M and am successfully
booting the system in multi-user mode.
The results can be viewed here https://pkg.personalbsd.org/baikal/

It succeeded because many devices on BAIKAL-M use fixed-clock and
everything is built on DesignWare IP.

But I stopped at the need to write a clock driver necessary for Ethernet
and PCIe to work.

If anyone would agree to advise me, I would be extremely grateful.

I am willing to provide access to BAIKAL-M but ssh (since USB Ethernet
works)
for easier collaboration and learning.

Any help or advice would be appreciated.

I am extremely interested in participating in the FreeBSD porting project
to the new SOC because I want to contribute to the popularization of
FreeBSD.

--
Yours faithfully,
Sergey Tyuryukanov