BBB 1GHz patches for u-boot 2014-01

[Winston Smith]

On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 11:48 PM, Sulev-Madis Silber (ketas)
<madis555 at hot.ee> wrote:
> On 2014-04-27 04:08, Winston Smith wrote:
>> On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 6:36 PM, fabiodive <fabiodive at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-arm/2014-April/007944.html
>>
>> Forgive my ignorance here, but these don't quite look like regular
>> patch files ... presumably they get applied to
>> crotchet-freebsd/board/BeagleBone to replace the ones already in
>> there?
>
>
> No, those patches update BB[WB] uboot port to new version and are
> perfectly good patches that patch(1) accepts. I bet you can hack those
> into crochet too, if you really wish.

Yeah, I was wondering about the extra Makefile etc.  I have been using
pkgng (and manual builds) rather than the ports tree.

I will have a go at hacking these into crotchet as that's how I'm
building u-boot (from a tarball).

> I also wonder about those weird SD errors... I have different issues
> myself (there's message for that already, so I don't repeat). But my
> issues always appear on boot. I currently don't run from external SD but
> I just tried it and IIRC there are no changes to this code after that.
> Internal SD (or eMMC, however you name it) works well, although I had to
> apply strange hack which apparently changes some timings so eMMC
> detection works correctly. I don't know how that code works, I never
> write HW drivers, so I have no idea on that issue. Well, ian@, who DOES
> write HW drivers, has no idea too :P

I'm not sure about the lock-reversal warnings, although this may
simply be a false-positive (since it's a WITNESS kernel?).

The timeout errors are more concerning ... esp. the panics (although I
haven't seen that).  I really need to start digging into how to debug
this [kernel] kind of stuff on the BBB.

> Maybe I should get more than one
> BBB (for which you need to make special order, I heard) to properly test
> my stuff and also other things like possible external SD weirdness. It's
> painful to boot from different medium to test some things while
> disturbing other things (long-running stability tests).

I don't think you need a special order to get more BBB's although the
availability ebbs and flows.  Seems like there's no availability right
now, but if you keep checking, you'll suddenly see everyone get stock.

Also, there's now apparently a company in China selling a clone of the BBB:

http://www.embest-tech.com/shop/star/bb-black-replica.html

According to some comments I saw on the beaglebone group, it seems to
be of good quality.

> I could say that
> BBB is nice piece of HW and 11-CURRENT is very STABLE (what a pun)
> overall, with (obviously) some CURRENTish glitches... I also must say
> that I use eMMC mostly read-only, with rare writes to upgrade (whole)
> system (which is ~150MB in size).

My reason for switching from 11-CURRENT to 10-STABLE is that the Go
folks aren't supporting Go on 11-CURRENT since it's not slated for
release for a long time!  (although Go 1.3beta1 + patches mostly
works).

However, Go works well [and is supported] on FreeBSD-10.  So I need to
find some middle ground between Go + FreeBSD and FreeBSD + BBB, which
I'm hoping will be 10-STABLE (and an eventual 10.1 release?).

> BTW, I usually use IRC (EFnet : #bsdmips + several others, and I never
> quit), because I somehow find writing long pieces of text difficult.
> Although I like mail as non-instant means of communication.

OK.  I'll dig up my IRC client!