FreeBSD on the AP121 (AR9330)

[Adrian Chadd]

Hi,

So I have FreeBSD mostly booting on the AR9330 based SoCs.

The trouble? These ship with 16MB RAM and 4MB flash.

CPU platform: Atheros AR9330 rev 1
CPU Frequency=400 MHz
CPU DDR Frequency=400 MHz
CPU AHB Frequency=200 MHz

...

Copyright (c) 1992-2013 The FreeBSD Project.
Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994
        The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
FreeBSD is a registered trademark of The FreeBSD Foundation.
FreeBSD 10.0-CURRENT #15 r248780:248782M: Tue Mar 26 22:31:51 PDT 2013
    adrian at marilyn:/home/adrian/work/freebsd/svn/obj/mipseb/mips.mips/usr/home/adrian/work/freebsd/svn/src/sys/AR9331
mips
gcc version 4.2.1 20070831 patched [FreeBSD]
WARNING: WITNESS option enabled, expect reduced performance.
Preloaded elf kernel "kernel" at 0x80538074.
real memory  = 16777216 (16384K bytes)
Physical memory chunk(s):
0x005d2000 - 0x00f90fff, 10219520 bytes (2495 pages)
avail memory = 9768960 (9MB)

The kernel is 4.5MB in size uncompressed and takes up ~ 2.5MB of RAM
just at startup. It's not going to be able to really do anything with
our current userland without killing processes. I know it won't even
be able to load the wlan/ath/bridge/switch modules.

So at this point I'm really, really looking for some help with cutting
down both the kernel binary size and the kernel memory footprint. It's
a bit ridiculous at this point.

The AR9330 is in a lot of the really cheap, really small APs that
companies like TP-Link make in ridiculous quantities. I'd love to
showcase FreeBSD + mesh on these, but there's just not enough space to
run things.

So, who's up for it? I can send you hardware if you start making
progress. Lots and lots of embedded hardware.

Thanks,



Adrian