ARM

Few weeks ago evdev support was finally committed to HEAD. Project started a part of SoC 2014 by Jakub Klama and then picked up, finished and submitted by Vladimir Kondratiev. It’s drop-in compatible with Linux API which means all you need to do is add #ifdef _FreeBSD around respective includes and existing code (if it’s otherwise cross-compatible with FreeBSD) should just work. Which is the case for Qt and to lesser extent for tslib. Hardware support is still moving target, FreeBSD has evdev-compatible drivers for USB keyboards, USB mice, TI’s AM33xx touchscreen controller and Raspberry Pi’s official touchscreen. Only the latter device supports multitouch and Vladimir submitted patch required to get it working. To my knowledge it’s the first multitouch touchscreen ever working on FreeBSD so I decided to record demo to save this moment for generations to come. Well, not really. Mostly to brag and to let people know that it’s possible and encourage them to make stuff and experiment with FreeBSD, ARM, and Qt. ...

With stable VCHIQ driver next obvious target was to add VCHIQ-based audio support. So let me introduce to you: vchiq_audio, first take. It’s part of vchiq-freebsd repo so if you use Crochet to build SD card image just enable option VideoCore in config file and module will be automatically included. From shell run kldload vchiq_audio and you’re good to do. I believe that audio output is picked up automatically by VideoCore so if you have HDMI connected it’s probably going to be HDMI. I do not have device to confirm this. Adding knob to control audio output (auto, headphones, HDMI) is on my ToDo list. ...

Update: support for keyboard/mouse has been added After New Year I got back to hacking the VCHIQ stuff (thanks to adrian@ for prodding). Since last time I touched NetBSD folks got it merged to main tree, syncing with latest upstream code and fixing some stupid bugs in my codebase. So I partially merged things back, spent some time on fixing more bugs introduced by yours truly, merged userland bits from latest Broadcom’s bits (and fixing some bugs introduced by them). And as a result VCHIQ got stable enough to run ioquake3d on raspberry pi. Well, you can’t play it because there is no sound and no mouse support and keyboard support is severely crippled but you can navigate menus and watch demoes. ...

QEMU support in FreeBSD/armv6 regressed since I tried it last time few months back. Changes in FreeBSD kernel and in QEMU itself revealed bugs that were masked by previous behaviour. In FreeBSD it was r248467: the way memory/IO resources are activated on FDT bus has been changed and it triggered bug in versatile_pci.c The other issue is more complex. It seems that PCI IRQ routing in QEMU was out of sync with real hardware. So after commit 66a96d7018b9cbabb73c9b87b62a37e4cc46580a IRQ numbers assigned to PCI devices by FreeBSD kernel by default were invalid. Authors of QEMU eventually added compatibility knob to fall back to previous logic. So if you’re using QEMU 1.5 or later add this option to your command line: ...

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. ...

It’s been a while since last update on the project status so it might seem as there was no progress in this area. The reality is: there is a bunch of activities happening with various levels of success. So I decided to give kind of end-of-the-year round-up of ongoing projects, plans and obstacles ARM hackers face. First of all we tried switching default cache type from write-through to write-back type. It should have increased performance but instead opened a can of worms. Memory corruption debugging led to L2 cache driver on Pandaboard, EHCI driver code and subsequently to busdma code. Whole process took quite a few days full of hair-pulling and nagging various people and ended up in committing USB fixes and Ian Lepore’s busdma patches. PL310 (L2 cache controller) driver is being tested at this very moment. Original issue (WB caches) still stands and postponed till next year. ...

[QEMU 1.5 users see this update] First take at getting FreeBSD/armv6 running in simulators. Simulators are great for tracking down nasty bugs and building packages. So here is support for Versatile Platform Board machine supported by QEMU. Most likely this code will not run on real VersatilePB because I do not have this hardware and timing code (or lack of it) on CLCD driver and Keyboard/Mouse interface (PL050) is pure guesswork. ...

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. ...