So, who makes this one run FreeBSD? ;-)

[John-Mark Gurney]

Bernd Walter wrote this message on Thu, Mar 31, 2005 at 23:06 +0200:
> On Thu, Mar 31, 2005 at 11:12:05AM -0800, John-Mark Gurney wrote:
> > Bernd Walter wrote this message on Thu, Mar 31, 2005 at 12:36 +0200:
> > > But considered the small price distance to the smallest Soekris,
> > > which runs FreeBSD, only the size and supply power is an interesting
> > > point.
> > 
> > Or you can look at the TS-7200 from http://www.embeddedarm.com/ .  It's
> > smaller than a Soekris, and is slightly larger than the PC-104 form
> > factor..  Right now I have it netbooting, but I need to figure out why
> > I have some ethernet issues...  The code is in p4, though if people
> > are really interested, I can generate a patch...
> 
> It costs more then the Soekris 4526-20 and is only slightly smaller in
> size.

plus has dual mini-pci..  while the TS-7200 only has PC-104 (basicly ISA)..

> And the 4526 doesn't need regulated power plus has onboard ata flash.

also looks like it supports PoE, which the TS-7200 doesn't...  Right
now I'm using a breadboarded LM7805 for power, but I am going to build
a daughter card for this project, and so I'm going to throw a switching
power supply on it.. so the regulated requirement isn't such a big deal..
also, it doesn't need as much power either..  TS says only 1 AMP at 5V
is necessary...  I haven't measured it yet though...

> But this is still an interesting board after all - especially as it has
> USB ports and lot of GPIO, which I need sometimes.
> USB on Soekris require add-on hardware our pricier boards.
> How stable is FreeBSD on ARMv9 already?
> I didn't even know that it is running yet.

So far it's been fine..  There may be issues with optimized crossbuilt
worlds from i386...  But I can boot multiuser mode, and it runs all the
scripts and everything to come up...

As I mentioned the ethernet is a bit flaky...  For some reason, some
packets have the underrun and carrier loss bit set on them..  This is
the case on packets around 80 bytes in size (like reverse dns packets
for 192.168.0.1, but not 192.168.0.10), and may be a timing issue that
I'm not familar with...  But nfs root boots fine...

I do plan on figuring it out...  USB doesn't work yet, it does probe,
but causes issues.. and even though they say it's USB 2.0, it's only
for electrical... No ehci controler.. the USB controller is ohci, and
so only supports up to full speed usb (12Mb/s)...

Also, this work isn't directly sponsored by TS, so it doesn't have any
drivers for their other boards, like the RTC, serial or lcd + keypad
parts that NetBSD does...

The real reason why I'm using the TS-7200 is because it had on board
AC'97 and I2S support (they aren't exposed to headers so I plan on
soldering my own wires to the chip)...  Which soekris definately doesn't
have... :)

dmesg from my last boot is at: http://people.freebsd.org/~jmg/dmesg.ts7200

As you can see, no RTC.. :)
18 Mar 15:36:25 ntpdate[241]: step time server 192.168.0.30 offset 1111188933.058709 sec

-- 
  John-Mark Gurney				Voice: +1 415 225 5579

     "All that I will do, has been done, All that I have, has not."