how to get freebsd on a new board?

[Ian Lepore]

On Tue, 2019-07-09 at 00:29 -0700, Antoni Sawicki wrote:
> I'm new to this so hi all!
> 
> I would like to get support on a new board, which is Odroid XU4. I'm
> not
> talking about hacking together uboot and running arm generic image.
> My
> question is how to get an official support so that images are
> automatically
> generated for future releases.
> 
> Is there an official way of lobbying for such a thing?
> Send hardware and some bribe?
> Bounty?
> Contract?
> 
> 

Hardware is typically so cheap and easily available that it isn't the
problem.  Time and level of effort are the problem.  You mention bribe,
bounty, contract.  The first two bring to mind offers like $100 or
$500.  When you consider how many hours of work are involved you aren't
going to interest anybody with that kind of offer.  If you paid a
contractor to do it, you'd be looking at $20,000 - $50,000 worth of
work, depending on how functional you want the support to be.

Most of the time, the work to get freebsd running on some 32-bit arm
chip is paid for by a company who wants to build products based on it,
because of how much it costs to fund such an effort.  The major
exception has been Allwinner -- some developers liked the hardware and
have done all the work on it without being sponsored by a company.  But
most of that "because I'm interested in it" work these days is going
into aarch64 stuff, not 32-bit.

-- Ian