FreeBSD on the $9 C.H.I.P

[Werner Thie]

Hi Kris

I have a board which did not boot when it arrived, but I was able to 
make it start up by going through their complete reflashing procedure. 
It's now running a headless version of Debian.

Apparently a lot of chips have been sent out which did not boot at all, 
but with re-flashing it seems to be possible to navigate around the bad 
blocks issue on the NAND flash. I didn't look too deep into the 
re-flashing but it seemed to me quite a stable and re-doable action.

So, basically it's looking at uboot, how the DTB would have to look like 
and then we would end up with a booting kernel and a few drivers 
missing, you seem to know more about that than I do.

Werner

On 2/10/16 2:32 PM, Kris wrote:
> Hi Werner,
> Basically there is interest (I am waiting for x2 CHIP boards, they are
> due in March, but I think they will be slightly delayed).
> Before I get boards the only reasonable thing for me to do is to get as
> much out of existing tree to see how it can be ported, but no actual work.
>
> Please be careful - there is no such a thing like Cortex A13. A13 is
> just a marketing name Allwinner gave to their product. And I believe
> CHIP put Allwinner R8 on their board (normally in ARM nomenclature,
> R=for deeply embedded devices, A=for applications, but again, it is
> Allwinner so you can expect anything from their naming convention).
> However R8 is indeed equipped with Cortex A8 core, for which I believe
> some work has been done - see Allwinner A20 in repo - it has the same
> core if my memory serves right (it is even pin compatible with single
> core Allwinner A10 -> again Cortex A8 :)
>
> Kris
>
> On 02/11/16 01:07, Werner Thie wrote:
>> Hi all
>>
>> is there any interest or work going on making FreeBSD available on the
>> $9 CHIP from nextthing.co?
>>
>> Basically it's a Cortex A13, 1GHz ARM V7A with 512MB RAM, NAND flash
>> and a slew of peripherals, the datasheet can be found on
>>
>> https://linux-sunxi.org/images/e/eb/A13_Datasheet.pdf
>>
>> Werner
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>