FreeBSD developer's notebook

I synced both vchiq-freebsd and userland to latest and greatest.

As I mentioned earlier – OS compatibility shim was removed from upstream sources so I had to create Linux KPI implementation layer which turned out not that awful task because I managed to reuse a lot of code from Max Khon’s DAHDI port. I had to implement (in somewhat hackish fashion) kthread API, re-implement semaphores support using condvar and mutex in order to get _interruptible part of API working properly and create dumb implementation of rather small subset of Linux list.h API.

With latest code I got pretty much all demos in hello_pi working except hello_jpeg(crashes system) and hello_encode(didn’t test). The most exciting bit for me was watching H.264 video playing on Raspberry Pi in hello_video demo. Network throughput still sucks so I had to copy file to tmpfs partition in order to get smooth playback though.

If you want to test VCHIQ – in addition to sources you’ll need latest firmware files. For demos you’ll also have to install freetype2 and manually hack Makefile.include in hello_pi. I’m planning to create ports/packages for both drivers and userland some time next week.

On the related note: Aleksandr Rybalko got XOrg working on Efika MX Smartbook so FreeBSD/Pi will get graphic interface soon

Long overdue update on how the things are going with FreeBSD on Raspberry Pi. We’ve made some good progress so far:

• Hans Petter Selasky fixed low-speed interrupt endpoints problem which means we have working USB keyboard now
• GPIO driver by Luiz Otavio O Souza. So now you can blink OK LED (gpioctl -f /dev/gpioc0 -t 16). Not the most productive activity though.
• Kernel now obtains information about display resolution, memory layout, MAC address from firmware
• Framebuffer/syscons support added
• Some stability fixes for SDHCI/li>
• Initial port of VCHIQ interface (vchiq-freebsd)
• Port of userland libraries (userland)

Overall stability and performance is still a problem, but it’s what we’re going to work on next.

And if you missed previous post: freebsd-pi is no more, use HEAD from FreeBSD subversion repository.

Boot process has been changed and now it looks like: firmware → uboot → ubldr → kernel. So old script for building image is no longer relevant. Here is new one. Tim Kientzle’s scripts collection for building images for BeagleBone, Pandaboard and RPi uses more systematic approach but RPi part hasn’t caught up to latest boot chain changes yet. Once it is up to date I suggest using Tim’s scripts.

Building FreeBSD does not require any additional tools but if you want VideoCore bits you’ll need following packages installed:

• devel/cmake
• devel/git
• devel/gmake

If you don’t need VideoCore binaries, just comment build_videocore and install_videocore calls. This script will also install OpenGL ES hello_triangle demo to /root folder. To run it run perform following steps:

# cd /root
# kldload vchiq
# ./hello_triangle.bin


I tried to build Qt5 with OpenGL ES support, but build choked on compile-time assert triggered by FreeBSD using OABI. Good news though: EABI work is almost done, so there is a fat chance we’ll see Qt5 with eglfs backend running on FreeBSD in near future.

You can try pre-built image (124Mb, MD5 sums). Login is “root”, no password. Use dd to write it to SD card. U-Boot seems to be somewhat finicky about SD cards, so if you get “** Unrecognized filesystem type **” message try another card. First boot might take some time because sshd will generate keys. U-Boot output goes to serial port and monitor, FreeBSD console messages go only to monitor, but by the end of boot sequence you should get login prompt on serial.

This image is a snapshot of work in progress and by no means a production system.

UPDATE

** Unrecognized filesystem type ** U-Boot issue seems to be more widespread then I thought. I’m working on it.