Porting FreeBSD to Raspberry Pi

[Lev Serebryakov]

Hello, Arnaud.
You wrote 4 ноября 2011 г., 19:48:29:

>>> $89, 700MHz Cortex A8, 256MB DRR2, micro-SD. However, do not expect
>>> being able to run FreeBSD on it before a few years :)
>>  What is so special about A8?
>>
> It is the consumer technology of today. The best people can afford
> without being in ARM's R&D centers.
> Let me tell you what is going to happen. ARM11 has been around for
> years, it will take you a year or two to complete the project, nice,
> hacker thrill, you did it. However, by the time you release it, the
> Raspberry Pi will be sold-out and will be replaced by an ARMv7 core,
> smaller, faster, eventually cheaper. By that time, the current
> technology will be a 64bits MP-core ARMv8, And you will be in the
> exact same situation as today, FreeBSD lagging one or two generation
> behind Linux, keep up.
  As I'm not a ARM specialist, I have several questions.

  Does porting to ARM11 (ARVv6, am I right?) will make porting to
ARMv7 (Cortex) easier? You see, i486 adds some nice commands, tricks
and configuration registers to i386, but porting to i486 after you
have working port to i386/Protected mode is almost trivial.
  Or it is completely different architectures, which doesn't have
anything in common?

  ARMvX is only a core, as far as I understand. How much different are
implementations from different vendors? MMU? Bus? Configuration space?

  Why do you think, porting to different ARMs should go sequentially?
:) Yes,  we (FreeBSD) doesn't have a lot of resources, but as nobody
could be forced to do what he don't want, it is better, IMHO, to have
ARM11 port, that to not have any ARM port at all.

  But I agree, that port to Cortex-A8/A9 looks more interesting :)

-- 
// Black Lion AKA Lev Serebryakov <lev at FreeBSD.org>