Orange Pi One

[Milan Obuch]

On Wed, 13 Apr 2016 15:13:48 -0700
Russell Haley <russ.haley at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 2:24 PM, Milan Obuch <freebsd-arm at dino.sk>
> wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > today I got this cheap board. After verifying it works with provided
> > linux based image I am trying to put FreeBSD on it. I would like to
> > understand boot process, but I did not find much info yet.
> >
> > Analysing image I see there are two partitions, first one being FAT
> > despite gpart telling both partitions are linux-data... and it seems
> > there are just two files important, script.bin and uImage in root
> > directory.  
> 
> It seems to be somewhat explained here:
> 
> http://linux-sunxi.org/Manual_build_howto
>

Thanks for this pointer. I see a lot of references here, so it will
take some time for me to understand everything.

> script.bin is a hardware description file and uImage is (of course)
> the Linux kernel. It sounds like the specific instance of u-boot for
> the Orange-pi is maintained by the sunxi group and loads the kernel
> directly from fat instead of from the rootfs.
> 
> The specifics of your board seem to be here:
> http://linux-sunxi.org/Xunlong_Orange_Pi_One
>

I did see this already, just did not understand it yet enough to get
anything usable from there. Again, some more time is needed on my
part...

> After some poking the FreeBSD info is here:
> 
> http://linux-sunxi.org/FreeBSD
>
> What a  nice little community page. Sure makes Allwinner specific
> stuff easy to find!
>

Sunxi group is great. They work with various devices, so there is much
interesting for anybody interested :)

> > As both files are binary, there is nothing more to reveal from
> > cursory view and I am going to look for more details on
> > www.orangepi.org page, just would like to know if someone already
> > did something. If yes, please let me know - I have no problem
> > building kernel and userland binaries, but first I need to get a
> > way to load kernel...  
> 
> It doesn't look like the Allwinner H family of processors is supported
> at all by FreeBSD.
> 
> http://linux-sunxi.org/FreeBSD
> 
> and my limited hardware understanding tells me it's a very different
> beast from the A10/A20 (meaning lots of work to port).
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allwinner_Technology
> 
> BUT if you're interested, here is the starting page for Allwinner
> stuff:
> 
> https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/arm/Allwinner
> 
> Either way, I'll hazard a guess that if you can place the FreeBSD
> kernel in the fat partition and update the u-boot environment
> variables with the file name and address, you may be able to get a
> kernel to load but that's just the first hurdle because (probably)
> nothing is going to work.
> 

Well, the moment I understand boot process so I can boot some kernel
we'll see... Being able to run FreeBSD on this board (it'just ~ 9 EUR +
3 EUR shipping, really cheap) would make me a way to create many
interesting things.

Thanks for all pointers provided. Really appreciated.

Regards,
Milan