opteron a1100 arm

[Warner Losh]

On Feb 5, 2014, at 7:34 AM, Kamil Choudhury wrote:

> 
> George wrote: 
>> This discussion is very entertaining.  But let's not lose sight of the
>> main point: ARM processors are not going away.  It is to FreeBSD's
>> detriment if we don't have Tier 1 support for a processor that, by some
>> guesses, already comprises the majority of new installations by count.
> 
> Moving on to specifics, what concrete steps would be necessary to actually 
> get FreeBSD support for this architecture? 

You'll need a new pmap for arm, and a bunch of other things. Plus you'll need to get ACPI working on arm64, and you may also need FDT + ACPI coexistence depending on your development route. Plus you'll need arm64 (aarch64) support in llvm and/or some external toolchain (which would mean you'd need to beef up the external toolchain support for freebsd's build). And then you'll need new drivers. And people to test it and hammer it and fix the stability issues that pop up. And that's not even considering the issues with pkg support etc.

It is a heavy lift to get all the way there, although a 'hack' port that gets to single user with a ram-disk or nfs root and a serial port working wouldn't be too hard.

So it's like Ian said: we need bodies working on this... So far, I'm only aware of one part timer.

Warner