Current state of FreeBSD iMX6 porting efforts?

[DJ Regan]

Hi Ian,

Understood sir. It happened to be the i.MX6UL (with ARM Cortex-A7, right?)
was most curious about. For embedded projects that don't require video or
audio... the Cortex-A7 may be all the power those embedded projects
require. I saw the SPI driver in the list of unfinished drivers. I also
didn't think it would be hard to port SPI from a working project over to
the iMX6. :)

Some i.MX6UL SOMs are being priced in the $24-ish (ex Variscite DART-6UL)
range, so at those low prices - > you'd think there are a lot of good
embedded application problems waiting to be solved with embedded FreeBSD. :)

I'm new to FreeBSD - but, I'm excited to learn more and try to make myself
useful to the community.

Thanks sir...
--DJ Regan

On Sun, Apr 2, 2017 at 12:44 PM, Ian Lepore <ian at freebsd.org> wrote:

> On Fri, 2017-03-31 at 09:11 -0500, DJ Regan wrote:
> > According to wiki page...
> >
> >     https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/arm/imx6/
> >
> > ...the last update of 'what works' vs 'what still needs to be done',
> > was...
> >
> >     FreeBSD/arm/imx6 (last edited 2015-02-02 01:54:07 by IanLepore
> > <https://wiki.freebsd.org/IanLepore>)
> >
> > ...what is the current state of iMX6 development?
> >
> > And, where can I start to help? :)
> >
> > Thanks,
> > --DJ Regan
>
> Sadly, the status now isn't all that different.  I think audio and
> video work now, including HDMI.  Even though I have like a dozen imx6
> boards here, I've never tried audio or video.
>
> The imx6 things I'm most likely to focus on this year are driven by the
> needs of $work:
>
>  - IEEE-1588 / PTP
>  - Better power management
>  - imx6ul support
>
> On a personal level, I've thought about buying an imx6qp board and see
> if the 'quad-plus' enhancements noticibly speed up anything except the
> graphics processors we don't support.
>
> What doesn't work that you'd like to see working?  That's probably the
> best place to start with helping, but sometimes even just asking for
> something gets surprising results.  For example I think we lack a SPI
> driver, and that's the kind of thing someone might spend a few days
> writing if there were a request for it.
>
> -- Ian
>
>