Re: RPI 4/5 u-boot new port, is there any interest?

On Wed, Jun 4, 2025 at 5:33 AM Klaus Küchemann
<maciphone2@googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
>
> a while ago, I spoke in more detail with bz@ about u-boot for the Pi5. There are ways to create a new port...
> Now I had a longer conversation with Hugo Kirnbichler on Discord. Hugo managed to patch u-boot for the RPI CM4 to make it NVMe bootable (compiled under FreeBSD).
> Details would go beyond the scope here for the first.
>
> What I would like to know:
> Is FreeBSD still interested in supporting the RPI4/5?
> Goodbye Pi in FreeBSD or Hello Pi , especially now ? :-)
>
> Then Hugo and I might be willing to create a new port.
> There's no other way to proceed... the u-boot mailing lists are aware of the problems, but nothing is happening because they don't need it for Linux. All the patches we know of are GPL’d from 3rd party companies or OS-projects afaik.
>
> Because it’s not really fun :-) , I don't want to continue this work if there is no official interest from FreeBSD.
> If you are interested, we would be happy to discuss the details here.

I'd say there's a lot of interest in running on RPi-5. That's
undeniable. There are many peole
that have this hardware and want to run it. As I indicated in other
email, from a developer
perspective, it's harder hardware to work on due to difficulties in
getting good docs at times
that are sufficient to write a good driver and/or having some resource
to contact when things
go wrong.

So, there's an imbalance. There were efforts to get it going that
stalled due to the death of
the person who was de-facto leading the charge who was senior enough to make it
successful. I've seen interest in people working on it that are less
junior so can't connect
all the dots, and go away because that's frustrating w/o better
support from the vendor.
Plus there's a long history with the RPi foundation that plays into
this as well since several
people have tried, but failed, to work with them and switched to
easier hardware /
hardware vendors to work with. On the other hand, these devices remain
super popular
and people in the community run them despite the support being not quite what
you'd want from the platform since the platform is adequate for a wide
range of things
that don't need that extra support.

So it's tricky. Nobody will be interested if there isn't a u-boot
foundation since FreeBSD
can't boot directly from the RPi firmware. On the other hand, it can
be tricky to get
people interested right away once that's available because the
learning curve is a bit
steep.

So it's unfair to say there's no official interest from FreeBSD. It's
just that there's a
lot of churn and choppiness that makes the experience difficult and
hard to judge.

Warner