FreeBSD on AmigaOne X5000

[Al Zick]

Hi Justin,

I don't know if this helps, but there is work being done to get the  
X5000 built in network ports working in both AmigaOS and Linux. I  
know the issue he had/has with the PHY hookups. Honestly, I am not  
sure which one of you are further along, so I don't know if that helps.

I will be installing FreeBSD on my X5000. I will let you know when I  
get it installed and then I will start testing.

Kind Regards,
Al




On Jan 18, 2018, at 12:11 PM, Justin Hibbits wrote:

> Hi Al,
>
> FreeBSD runs pretty well on the AmigaOne X5000, but there are some
> gotchas right now.  It needs a minor change to the dts in order to use
> the ethernet controller, and you currently have to make an
> execute-in-place uImage, for 64-bit kernels anyway.
>
> The former is impossible to work around, because the device tree is
> just incorrect with regard to the PHY hookups (it lists TBI
> connections, but the AmigaOne X5000 uses rgmii, which puts all
> connections through dtsec0's mdio).  You can find my working device
> tree at https://people.freebsd.org/~jhibbits/cyrus_p5020_amiga2.dtb .
>
> The latter I'm currently working on, and plan to have ubldr loading
> 64-bit kernels in the next couple weeks, so we won't need to build
> uImages.  But, for now, the way I do it is:
>
> buildkernel with KERNCONF=QORIQ64
>
> Using NetBSD's 'mkubootimage' (easy enough to build on FreeBSD with
> some minor tweaks to the source), run:
>
> mkubootimage -A powerpc -C none -T kernel -O linux -a 0x3ffffc0 -e
> <entrypoint from readelf -h> -N "FreeBSD AmigaOne X5000"
> amiga64.uImage /path/to/built/kernel
>
> Then I can boot that image via either dhcp or sata (Be sure to load it
> to 0x3ffffc0, for some reason uboot doesn't copy the image when loaded
> to the default loadaddr of 0x01000000).
>
> Booting from SATA you need to create an MBR partition scheme, and the
> first partition must be FAT, since uboot doesn't know how to read
> FreeBSD disklabels and UFS.  I made two partitions: 128MB FAT to put
> the kernel, ubldr, and dtb; and the rest of my disk is a BSD disklabel
> volume, partitioned like a normal FreeBSD system.  You would put the
> dtb and uImage in the FAT partition, and set the uboot bootargs
> environment variable to 'vfs.root.mountfrom=ufs:/dev/ada0s2a'
> (assuming /dev/ada0s2a is the root you create, as my example is)
>
>
> As for what you can do to help, that depends on your skill set.
>
> If you're happy in the kernel:
> * I have some patches to drm2 so it can load the radeonkms driver, but
> it crashes due to TLB synchronization issues between the two cores,
> that might be interesting to look at.
> * Performance improvements:  CPU0 is seeing a very high decrementer
> interrupt count, measured with vmstat -i.  I think this might be uboot
> messing up the clock frequency information populating, but I'm not
> sure.  Maybe test that.
> * There are still device drivers missing for things like the XMOS  
> and CPLD.
>
> If you'd prefer userspace, once you have FreeBSD installed, and able
> to use the network:
> * Build a kernel with ZFS (just add "options ZFS" to the QORIQ config,
> or create your own), and test building everything with poudriere.
> Report any bugs and panics you see.  Just hammer away.
> * It's pretty boringly stable up in userspace, so it's hard for me to
> think of anything more.
>
> Let me know what you're interested in, and I can point you to
> somewhere you can help.
>
> Glad to see interest in this!
>
> - Justin
>
> On Wed, Jan 17, 2018 at 5:20 PM, Al Zick  
> <al at familysafeinternet.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Would it be possible to find out about how much progress has been  
>> made on
>> the FreeBSD port to the AmigaOne X5000 in the last few months and  
>> if there
>> is anything that I can do to help?
>>
>> Kind Regards,
>> Al
>>
>>
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