Uncategorized on FreeBSD developer's notebook

CentOS 7 VM boot issue

Fri, 10 Jan 2020 22:21:01 +0000

If you’re building OVA based on CentOS 7 and your VM is stuck during boot at “tsc: Refined TSC clocksource calibration: NNNN.MMM MHz” message do not despair! It means the kernel can not find the root device and just waits for it to pop up. Which is not going to happen. In my case, it was a lack of required drivers loaded boot-time. Following line in an OVA build script resolved the issue:

Recreating Sneakers scene

Sat, 28 Sep 2019 16:57:12 +0000

(Not a FreeBSD topic)

A long time ago, in my teens, I watched movie Sneakers and was very impressed by it. It was exactly how I imagined hackers at work: bare PCBs, signal probes, de-scrambling encrypted information right on the screen. I was so impressed by the latter part that I went to re-create a bit of “No more secrets” scene using the only technologies I knew back then: Turbo Pascal running on MS-DOS. It wasn’t an exact replica but it was close enough and I was quite happy with the result. The program itself hasn’t survived my numerous moves from one apartment to another and got lost along with all the floppy discs sometime in the early aughts.

FreeBSD support for pyu2f

Sun, 22 Sep 2019 13:39:41 +0000

After long hiatus (because $JOB) I’m trying to find some time to spend on FreeBSD-related projects, looking for small ones that can be done over weekend or a bit more. One of the ideas came from Ed Maste’s twitter: implement FreeBSD support for pyu2f. Since I already spent some time working on FreeBSD U2F support for Chromium it felt like a good small project.

The challenging part of the project was not U2F/HID but interfacing ioctl with Python, something I have never done before. It wasn’t super complex and I learned about Python’s ctype module.

Inky pHat on FreeBSD/Pi

Wed, 14 Nov 2018 10:21:27 +0000

About a month ago I purchased Inky pHat from Pimoroni, Pi hat with 220x104 red and black eInk screen. The device has an SPI interface with three additional GPIO signals: reset pin, command/data pin, and busy pin. Reset and busy pins are self-explanatory: the former resets device MCU the latter signals to the Pi whether the MCU is busy handling previous command/data. Command/data signals the type of SPI transaction that is about to be sent to Inky: low means command, high - data. It more or less matches interface to SSD1306 OLED display I played with before.

Raspberry Pi UART0 default frequency

Wed, 14 Dec 2016 14:46:02 +0000

If you’re trying to boot FreeBSD with latest RaspberryPi firmware - be aware that this commit changed default frequency for UART0 on at least RaspberryPi 2, so to get serial console working in u-boot/ubldr again you need to add this line to config.txt:

init_uart_clock=3000000

Debugging tip: checking kernel DTB from userland

Thu, 01 Dec 2016 17:23:08 +0000

You can get source for current kernel FDT blob by running following command

sysctl -b hw.fdt.dtb | dtc -I dtb -O dts

Edit 27/10/2017: added -O option, looks like it’s required in newer dtc

MFC tracking tool filters

Sat, 29 Oct 2016 15:20:21 +0000

I’ve just added extended filters to http://mfc.kernelnomicon.org. Now filter can be either committer, or path, or both. Path is indicated by adding @ character to the beginning, so gonzo means all commits by gonzo, @sys/arm means all commits to sys/arm directory, and gonzo@sys/arm means all commits by gonzo to sys/arm directory. If there are more then one expression separated by space the result will be all filters OR-ed together: @sys/arm @boot/efi means all commits to sys/arm plus all commits to boot/efi directory.

Raspberry Pi userland repo update

Tue, 25 Oct 2016 11:44:40 +0000

raspberrypi-userland git repo was synced to the latest upstream code base: https://github.com/gonzoua/userland/tree/freebsd

Netbooting FreeBSD with PXE/UEFI

Thu, 29 Sep 2016 16:11:10 +0000

Dear Future Me,

I guess you came here googling for “FreeBSD PXE UEFI” trying to find out how to netboot your x86 dev box. Or arm64 box. Who knows what you’re hacking on in the future. To do that you need follow these simple steps:

Put loader.efi to tftpboot dir
Configure dhcpd along these lines:

host amd64 {
        hardware ethernet  b8:ae:ed:77:88:99;
        filename "loader.efi";
        option root-path "/src/FreeBSD/tftproot/amd64";
        fixed-address 192.168.10.102;
        option routers 192.168.10.1;
}

Make sure root-path is in /etc/exports.
If you use MINIMAL-derived config add your NIC driver to /boot/loader.conf:

if_re_load="YES"

That’s pretty much it.

Untethering Jetson-TK1

Sun, 25 Sep 2016 18:11:43 +0000

Normally I netboot all my ARM devices but in case of Jetson TK1 I thought it would be nice to go and try to make it “real computer” - running by itself, may be use it for some port builds. I added Samsung EVO to it but the plan was to use SSD for builds/source code, and to use either external SD card or eMMC as a root device. TK1 survived buildworld/buildkernel (I had to add swap though, clang is a memory monster) so it was time to populate root device and eMMC was picked as a target. There were some ms-basic-data partitions on eMMC but I didn’t think much of it and happily typed dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mmcsd0 bs=128m. Well… Big mistake. Among those partitions was u-boot. And probably earlier stage boot loader as well. So I had to install ubuntu on one of unused machines and re-flash TK1. Luckily no permanent damage was done to the device. After this accident I added a little bit of planning into the process. Here is short summary:

Controlling AC power using GPIO

Thu, 24 Dec 2015 12:50:16 +0000

Being able to power cycle ARM boards remotely (without spending a lot of $$$) was on my wish list for way to long, so I finally got around to put something together. The obvious way to do this is power relay controlled by GPIO + remotely accessible GPIO port. For the former I picked up this relay by Digital Loggers. It was four ports, only two of them are connected at a time, you can switch selected pair by setting control port level. For a controller part I picked up RIoTBoard but actually any ARM board with sshd running on it and user-accessible GPIO pin would do.

i.MX6 IPU and HDMI drivers

Wed, 09 Dec 2015 15:10:39 +0000

Back from vacation and back to work. Once I got RIoTboard up and running next natural step was to wrap up some i.MX6 project I had in “almost finished” state for months. So now they’re in “going through review” state: drivers for HDMI framer and IPU. They add basic 1024x768 console for iMX6 board. Video mode management requires more sophisticated timers framework, that is being work on as a part of Jetson TK1 port.

RIoTboard support

Thu, 12 Nov 2015 20:28:13 +0000

My career as a trendy videoblogger starts to pay off. Nice people from Newark element14 offered to send me some hardware for experiments (no strings attached) I took them up on their offer and few days later received RIoTboard. It’s iMX6 Solo in developer-friendly package, not as compact as Beaglebone but nicely built and comes with more connectors.

FreeBSD’s iMX6 support is very good, so it took two one-line fixes to FreeBSD kernel code to make it work on RIoTboard. The other chunk of work was U-Boot package. Took more time than it should have due to some operator errors. The bring up process is more or less the same as for any other iMX6 system, so it should be really easy to add this board to crochet. Step by step it looks like this (some of the code came from crochet):

FreeBSD on RPi 2 progress

Mon, 09 Nov 2015 15:04:20 +0000

Quick update on progress in FreeBSD’s support of Raspberry Pi:

VCHIQ driver was updated to the latest vendor code and bunch of FreeBSD-specific problems was fixed: locking, handling of non-cacheline aligned data
Raspberry Pi userland code was updated to the latest vendor code
Mikael Urankar created misc/raspberrypi-userland for userland libraries/utilities
Mikael also created multimedia/omxplayer port for OMXPlayer, video player developed for RPi. It’s also used in Kodi player on Pi.
I created misc/ioquake-pi port to make it easier for people to try it out

I put together all this stuff on my brand new Pi 2 and recorded demo that showcases, OpenGL, Quake3, omxplayer, camera, and audio. I hope all these ports will be committed/updated before next round of armv6 packages build.

Official 7" Raspberry Pi Touchscreen Display and FreeBSD

Fri, 23 Oct 2015 12:28:47 +0000

Received yesterday and had to assembly it first thing today. Display part works like a charm without any system modifications. Haven’t researched touchscreen part though.

FreeBSD, BBB, and 4DCAPE-43T: touchscreen

Fri, 16 Oct 2015 19:42:08 +0000

And yet another demo of 4DCAPE-43T, this time it’s touchscreen. On AM335x SoC touchscreen controller is coupled with analog-to-digital converter, for which there is a driver in FreeBSD HEAD: ti_adc. I had to implement touchscreen part and add driver userland communication protocol. For proof of concept I used significantly dumbed-down version of Linux input event protocol. tslib serves as a userland part of the demo. I believe it’s de-facto standard for touchscreen devices interface in Linux world. Only two things were changed comparing to stock one: I added bsd-raw input plugin to communicate with kernel and rewrote framebuffer-related routines.

More fun with Beaglebone Black and 4DCAPE-43T

Fri, 09 Oct 2015 22:46:17 +0000

I like Qt. It runs on everything. More than 10 years ago you could run it on Linux/ARM on Sharp Zaurus and now you can run it on FreeBSD/Pi. I thought it would look neat on LCD screen on BBB and coded small demo player (qt-demo-player sources) just for the fun of it. Stock Qt does not have FreeBSD framebuffer support so I had to hack it up (qt-platform-scfb sources). Also it seems they still consider FreeBSD/clang second class citizen comparing to FreeBSD/gcc which causes some minor POSIX-related incompatibility fallout. But other than that it was smooth sailing, patch against vendor tree is really small. I’ll post it later along with build instructions. In addition to scfb platform support Qt console input plugins required: qt5-bsd-input

HDMI support for Beaglebone Black

Thu, 09 Jul 2015 15:28:53 +0000

Just quick (and overdue) update: HDMI for BBB is in HEAD as of r284534.

HDMI progress and 4DCAPE-43 support for Beaglebone Black

Sat, 28 Feb 2015 19:54:28 +0000

HDMI support for Beaglebone Black is stable now and supports reading EDID, you can get the path here. Before committing it I’d like to make interoperability between HDMI framer and FB/LCD drivers as generic as possible and for this I need at least one more system with working HDMI to find common patterns. For this purpose I picked up i.MX6-based Hummingboard and now try to get video output working on it. There is some minor progress but it seems before getting to HDMI/IPU I need to do some work on clock management part of the system. So it’s going to be some time before I see first pixels on my monitor.

HDMI support for Beaglebone Black: first milestone

Sun, 18 Jan 2015 18:56:06 +0000

Today for the first time I’ve got stable and correctly positioned output on HDMI monitor connected to BeagleBone Black. It involved fixing bug in AM335x LCDC controller, fixing bug in I2C controller, and a lot of experiments with register-pushing. Code requires major clean-up and is not ready for the tree yet. I’ll post patch when it’s in readable form.

Update on ioquake/ARM for FreeBSD: controls support added

Tue, 13 Jan 2015 21:22:33 +0000

I’ve update ioquake binaries and pushed respective changes to github. New version has support for mouse and keyboard so you can actually play Quake3 on FreeBSD/Pi alas without sound. It should run out of the box on normal console. Make sure you have moused running or specify mouse device by setting Q_MOUSE_DEV environment variable, e.g.:

env Q_MOUSE_DEV=/dev/ums0 ioquake3.arm +set s_initsound 0

State of FreeBSD/MIPS emulation

Wed, 04 Sep 2013 15:22:24 +0000

A week ago Adrian Chadd asked me to take a loot at FreeBSD/MIPS emulation. So last week I’ve been busy tidying up stuff in that department and looking up bits of information on various emulators. This morning I finally committed last changeset so now is the time to write up summary.

Emulators

There are two widely used MIPS emulatoes that FreeBSD supports: QEMU and GXemul. Both of them support numerous MIPS devices but we’re interested in only two.

USB driver for FreeBSD/Beaglebone

Thu, 27 Jun 2013 21:10:36 +0000

It took me two months but I finally got back to hacking on musb driver for FreeBSD (the one that is used in TI AM335x-based devices like Beaglebone or Beaglebone Black). Previous revision turned out not to be ready for production. Here is the new one: beaglebone-usb-20130626.diff. I adopted it to latest HEAD, fixed numerous bugs, added support for SPLIT transactions and USB suspend/resume signalling. There is some cleaning-up to do but unless something major comes up the plan is to commit it over next few days.

Framebuffer/syscons support for AM335x

Sun, 26 May 2013 17:48:44 +0000

I finally got around to finishing the PWM and LCDC driver for AM335x. Everything was committed today. Here is demo on AM335x EVM (I apologize for quality):

Netbooting ARM/MIPS devices: ubldr

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 19:24:19 +0000

As it was mentioned in previous post U-Boot can boot FreeBSD kernel directly but this approach doesn’t allow a great deal of control over boot process: there is no way to set tunables’ values or pre-load module. Controlling this stuff requires more knowledge of FreeBSD internal data structures and its boot process then U-Boot holds.

On i386 and other Tier1 architectures this task is handled by the loader(8) program. It’s last stage boot loader (e.g. it’s supposed to pass control to FreeBSD kernel only), highly customizable and scriptable. loader(8) relies on one of the previous stages boot loader to access resources like disks, console, network. For i386 it’s BTX and BIOS.

Netbooting ARM/MIPS devices: server setup

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 18:50:42 +0000

I was asked to share details about my root-over-NFS setup so here they are. I decided to split how-to in two posts: server/kernel part and u-boot part.

Usual components in the setup are:

DHCP server
TFTP server
NFS server
NAT (optional)

DHCP server

I use net/isc-dhcp42-server as a server. Sample dhcpd.conf:

option root-opts code 130 = string; # NFS / mount options
log-facility local7;

subnet 192.168.10.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
        server-name "cinderella.bluezbox.com";
        server-identifier 192.168.10.1;
        option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
        option broadcast-address 192.168.10.255;
        option domain-name-servers 8.8.8.8;
        option domain-name "bluezbox.com";
        next-server 192.168.10.1;
        option routers 192.168.10.1;
}

group {
        host pandaboard {
                hardware ethernet 0E:60:33:B1:46:01;
                fixed-address 192.168.10.90;
                filename "kernel.PANDA.bin";
                option root-path "/src/FreeBSD/nfs/armv6";
                option root-opts "nolockd";
        }

        host rpi {
                hardware ethernet b8:27:eb:f6:08:83;
                fixed-address 192.168.10.91;
                filename "ubldr";
                option root-path "/src/FreeBSD/nfs/rpi";
                option root-opts "nolockd";
        }
}

Config is pretty self-explanatory. I use google’s 8.8.8.8 nameserver but you can change it to your very own DNS server. Difference between various filename “…” will be explained later.

Netbooting Hackberry A10 (Allwinner A10)

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 00:14:34 +0000

Last few weeks I’ve been acting as a reviewer for Ganbold Tsagaankhuu’s port of FreeBSD for Cubieboard so in order to provide more valuable input and less naysaying I decided to get A10-based device to test his changes. So I ordered Hackberry from miniand.com. I’m not great fan of pushing SD cards back and forth so first thing I do with my SoCs is get them netbooting. That’s where fun begins.

Accessing GPIO from Perl, Python, and Ruby

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 18:01:21 +0000

I started this smallish project to overcome coder’s block and original idea was to implement it in only one scripting language. I chose Python as I believed it had most clear API but then I decided to throw in Perl and Ruby as well. It was more exercise in building C extensions then in actual system programming but it was fun nonetheless. All three sub-projects lack proper documentation but there are examples that should be enough to get started.

Building image for Raspberry Pi: up to date version

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 15:00:02 +0000

Update 1: Add -DDB_FROM_SRC to install targets Update 2: Add user “pi” with password “raspberry” Update 3: Added host system requirements suggested in comments Update 4: Rename bcm2835-rpi-b.dtb to rpi.dtb

It’s been a while since I posted original build instruction and a lot has change. Here is new version of it with some explanations:

First make sure your host system is configured properly:

WITHOUT_FORTH= must NOT be set in src.conf
msdos support must be available in the kernel
geom_md support must be available in the kernel

All code has been moved to HEAD. freebsd-pi repository on github serves only historical purpose and I guess will be removed at some point in future. So in order to build image you need sources for -head

Packages(*) for Rasberry Pi(**)

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 20:05:44 +0000

I finally got around to setting up experimental pkgng repo for ARM in order to share packages with other ARM developers and users who feel adventurous. And man, was it simple. I have pandaboard that is super-fast comparing to Raspberri Pi so I use it for building ports. There were several installed so I just had to generate packages for them using

pkg create -a

command. Then I uploaded all newly generated files to the server, grabbed packages built and shared by Stephen Hurd, removed duplicates with older versions and generated repo.txz by issuing

VCHI driver, part 2

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 15:33:02 +0000

Some time ago I announced port of VCHI driver to FreeBSD. Since then it was re-licensed as BSD/GPL and I had high hopes for bringing it into the tree as a part of sys/contrib. This weekend I finally got around to it but turned out things had changed for worse. VCHI driver used to have this neat OS-abstraction wrapper, so overall porting process was quite simple: implement synch primitives, physical pages management, driver-specific initialization and you’re done. But… The layer was lost with driver update in October. The reason for it - OS compatibility shims are banned from Linux mainline kernel.

Broadcom switches vchiq to dual license

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 21:25:34 +0000

vchiq, kernel driver for interfacing ARM with VideoCore is now dual-licensed (BSD/GPL).

References: https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/40 https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/commit/d21d26ebd773ab87888351220739b43a9733233a

U-Boot env variables iterator

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 15:26:49 +0000

Ran into it recently and decided to post here just in case someone will have this problem too. Do not define both CONFIG_LOADADDR and loadaddr in CONFIG_EXTRA_ENV_SETTINGS. Otherwise environment variables enumeration API(API_ENV_ENUM) will loop forever.

FreeBSD/Pi update

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 19:34:32 +0000

So, here is status update on the progress:

freebsd-pi github repo has been merged to HEAD and should be considered only as a reference from now on.
I repackaged freebsd-pi-uboot-20120806-sd.tar.gz so tar should not complain about uid/guid stuff
Hans Peter Selasky and Alexander Rybalko added host mode support for DWC OTG driver
Problem with tty on serial port has been fixed. Use 3wire.115200 type for ttyu0 in /etc/ttys

Still a lot of stuff to do though. P.S. I’ll post updated build script later.

projects/armv6 branch is no more

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 19:18:43 +0000

ARMv6/AMRv7 support is now in main FreeBSD codebase.

New goodies:

General ARMv6/ARMv7 kernel bits (pmap, cache, assembler routines, etc…)
ARM SMP support
VFP/Neon support
ARM Generic Interrupt Controller driver
Improved thread-local storage for cpus >=ARMv6
Two new values for TARGET_ARCH: armv6 and armv6eb
Driver for SMSC LAN95XX and LAN8710A ethernet controllers
Marvell MV78x60 support (multiuser, ARMADA XP kernel config)
TI OMAP4 and AM335x support (multiuser, no GPU or graphics support, kernel configs for Pandaboard and Beaglebone)
LPC32x0 support (multiuser, frame buffer works with SSD1289 LCD controller.Embedded Artists EA3250 kernel config)
Barebone Nvidia Tegra2 support (timers, interrupts and UART. No kernel config)

I’m going to re-create Raspberry Pi port off HEAD and start merging least intrusive bits back to the tree.

FreeBSD/Pi setup HowTo

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 19:54:16 +0000

This instruction is no longer correct. New version is here

Took some time but it seems we’re there too :)

Alexander Rybalko, who works on USB drivers for the platform got remote telnet shell to the device: http://pastebin.com/6NqQLWD2

Having fixed serial console for userland applications (two lines change) and after some tweaking of SDHCI driver I got access to multiuser shell too: multiuser.txt Still not usable for putting together distros but stable enough for those who are willing to get their hands dirty with kernel side.

BSD Pi

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 21:34:06 +0000

NetBSD reached multiuser on Raspberry Pi! Congratulation to Nick Hudson and all involved.

FreeBSD is not there yet, but we’re not slacking either:

Well, may be just a little. It’s not even single user yet. SDHC support is work in progress. No USB yet, hence no keyboard and no network. Just console output to framebuffer or serial port.

New U-Boot build

Sat, 07 Jul 2012 13:20:39 +0000

New build for Raspberry Pi. ChangeLog:

New firmware
Improved SD card performance
Added USB mass storage devices support
Added ext2 filesystem support (painfully slow with SD card, tolerable with USB memory stick)

Tarball: raspberry-pi-uboot-20120707.tar.gz

SD card image (32Mb): raspberry-pi-uboot-20120707.img

U-Boot for Raspberry Pi, the last step

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 00:28:35 +0000

Yes, the last step. It doesn’t mean that I’m abandoning this project. Not at all. It just that it has reached the state I wanted it to reach from the very beginning: fairly stable, flexible u-boot distribution suitable to be used as an environment for OS bring-up. So now it’s time to get back to the original idea: get FreeBSD running on Raspberry Pi.

So, current state of affairs is raspberry-pi-uboot-20120621.tar.gz. It includes:

U-Boot for Raspberry Pi, step 8: SDHC support

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 12:59:32 +0000

Initial support for SD card has just been pushed to github repo.

U-Boot 2012.04.01-00479-gb58d9ae-dirty (Jun 20 2012 - 11:47:13)

DRAM:  128 MiB
WARNING: Caches not enabled
MMC:   CAPS: 00000000
bcm2835_sdh: 0
Using default environment

In:    serial
Out:   serial
Err:   serial
Net:   Net Initialization Skipped
No ethernet found.
U-Boot> mmcinfo
Device: bcm2835_sdh
Manufacturer ID: 1b
OEM: 534d
Name: 00000
Tran Speed: 25000000
Rd Block Len: 512
SD version 2.0
High Capacity: No
Capacity: 1.9 GiB
Bus Width: 4-bit
U-Boot> fatls mmc 0
    16528   bootcode.bin
      127   cmdline.txt
   314691   loader.bin
  2047848   start.elf
   181196   kernel.img

5 file(s), 0 dir(s)

U-Boot>

U-Boot for Raspberry Pi, step 7: cleanup

Sun, 17 Jun 2012 19:32:26 +0000

More progress on the subject:

I cleaned up sources and pushed new version to github.
Stephen Warren submitted patches for R-Pi support to U-Boot mailing list here and here. His version is much cleaner so I spent some time combining his patches with ported USB driver. So now target is called rpi_b and you should use “make rpi_b_config” instead of “make raspberry_pi_config” step when building U-Boot from sources.
Pre-built binaries are available for download here.

U-Boot for Raspberry Pi, step 6: It lives!

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 20:15:27 +0000

And finally it works!

U-Boot 2012.04.01-00306-gecc6e3d-dirty (Jun 15 2012 - 19:05:09)

DRAM:  128 MiB
WARNING: Caches not enabled
Using default environment

In:    serial
Out:   serial
Err:   serial
Net:   No ethernet found.
Raspberry-Pi # usb start
(Re)start USB...
USB:   Core Release: 2.80a
scanning bus for devices... 3 USB Device(s) found
       scanning bus for ethernet devices... 1 Ethernet Device(s) found
Raspberry-Pi # dhcp
Waiting for Ethernet connection... done.
BOOTP broadcast 1
*** Unhandled DHCP Option in OFFER/ACK: 28
*** Unhandled DHCP Option in OFFER/ACK: 28
DHCP client bound to address 192.168.10.21
Using sms0 device
TFTP from server 192.168.10.1; our IP address is 192.168.10.21
Filename 'kernel.RPI'.
Load address: 0x700000
Loading: #################################################################
         #################################################################
         #################################################################
         #################################################################
         ######################################################
done
Bytes transferred = 4597674 (4627aa hex)
Raspberry-Pi # ping 192.168.10.1
Waiting for Ethernet connection... done.
Using sms0 device
host 192.168.10.1 is alive
Raspberry-Pi #

U-Boot on Raspberry Pi, step 5: More USB stuff

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 00:54:09 +0000

OK. No visual progress, but short SitRep: I got control transfers working more stable and got bulk transfer somewhat working: U-Boot sends one packet and receives response, then all bulk transfers end up in STALL state. Investigating.

BOOTP broadcast 1
** smsc95xx_send(), len 342, buf 0x7e8db5e
BULK -> <3,2>
dev = 3 pipe = 2 buf = 07e8db5e size = 350 dir_out = 1
max_hc_xfer_size = 65535, max_hc_pkt_count = 511
xfer_len = 350, num_packets = 6, max = 64, buffer = 07e8db5e(07e8f490)
Tx: len = 350, actual = 350, err = 0
** smsc95xx_recv()
BULK -> <3,1>
dev = 3 pipe = 1 buf = 07fec698 size = 2048 dir_out = 0
max_hc_xfer_size = 65535, max_hc_pkt_count = 511
xfer_len = 2048, num_packets = 32, max = 64, buffer = 07fec698(07e8f490)
Rx: len = 2048, actual = 368, err = 0
packet received
packet received
Receive from protocol 0x800
Got IP
len=346, v=45
DHCPHandler: got packet: (src=67, dst=68, len=318) state: 3
Filtering pkt = 0
DHCPHandler: got DHCP packet: (src=67, dst=68, len=318) state: 3
DHCP: state=SELECTING bp_file: "kernel.RPI"
TRANSITIONING TO REQUESTING STATE
*** Unhandled DHCP Option in OFFER/ACK: 130
*** Unhandled DHCP Option in OFFER/ACK: 28
DhcpSendRequestPkt: Sending DHCPREQUEST
Transmitting DHCPREQUEST packet: len = 342
** smsc95xx_send(), len 342, buf 0x7e8dace
BULK -> <3,2>
dev = 3 pipe = 2 buf = 07e8dace size = 350 dir_out = 1
max_hc_xfer_size = 65535, max_hc_pkt_count = 511
xfer_len = 350, num_packets = 6, max = 64, buffer = 07e8dace(07e8f490)
Channel halted
Tx: len = 350, actual = 0, err = 0
BOOTP broadcast 2
** smsc95xx_send(), len 342, buf 0x7e8db5e
BULK -> <3,2>

dev = 3 pipe = 2 buf = 07e8dace size = 350 dir_out = 1
max_hc_xfer_size = 65535, max_hc_pkt_count = 511
xfer_len = 350, num_packets = 6, max = 64, buffer = 07e8dace(07e8f490)
Channel halted
Tx: len = 350, actual = 0, err = 0
BOOTP broadcast 2
** smsc95xx_send(), len 342, buf 0x7e8db5e
BULK -> <3,2>
dev = 3 pipe = 2 buf = 07e8db5e size = 350 dir_out = 1
max_hc_xfer_size = 65535, max_hc_pkt_count = 511
xfer_len = 350, num_packets = 6, max = 64, buffer = 07e8db5e(07e8f490)
Channel halted
Tx: len = 350, actual = 0, err = 0
** smsc95xx_recv()
BULK -> <3,1>
dev = 3 pipe = 1 buf = 07fec698 size = 2048 dir_out = 0
max_hc_xfer_size = 65535, max_hc_pkt_count = 511
xfer_len = 2048, num_packets = 32, max = 64, buffer = 07fec698(07e8f490)
HANG at line 533: 00000423

U-Boot on Raspberry Pi, step 4: DWC OTG, Control transactions

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 00:20:11 +0000

After rather busy weekend I finally got control transaction support for DWC OTG controller working on Raspberry Pi. U-Boot DWC OTG driver is cut-down version of Linux driver that works in polling mode. Stability is not very good at the moment though. And make sure to use latest firmware files. It does matter.

Next step - bulk transactions.

Repo: https://github.com/gonzoua/u-boot-pi

Raspberry-Pi # usb info
1: Hub,  USB Revision 1.10
 - DWC OTG RootHub
 - Class: Hub
 - PacketSize: 8  Configurations: 1
 - Vendor: 0x0000  Product 0x0000 Version 0.0
   Configuration: 1
   - Interfaces: 1 Self Powered 0mA
     Interface: 0
     - Alternate Setting 0, Endpoints: 1
     - Class Hub
     - Endpoint 1 In Interrupt MaxPacket 8 Interval 255ms

2: Hub,  USB Revision 2.0
 - Class: Hub
 - PacketSize: 64  Configurations: 1
 - Vendor: 0x0424  Product 0x9512 Version 2.0
   Configuration: 1
   - Interfaces: 1 Self Powered Remote Wakeup 2mA
     Interface: 0
     - Alternate Setting 0, Endpoints: 1
     - Class Hub
     - Endpoint 1 In Interrupt MaxPacket 1 Interval 255ms

3: Vendor specific,  USB Revision 2.0
 - Class: Vendor specific
 - PacketSize: 64  Configurations: 1
 - Vendor: 0x0424  Product 0xec00 Version 2.0
   Configuration: 1
   - Interfaces: 1 Self Powered Remote Wakeup 2mA
     Interface: 0
     - Alternate Setting 0, Endpoints: 3
     - Class Vendor specific
     - Endpoint 1 In Bulk MaxPacket 64
     - Endpoint 2 Out Bulk MaxPacket 64
     - Endpoint 3 In Interrupt MaxPacket 16 Interval 1ms

R-Pi Boot process

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 20:12:12 +0000

Just a note to myself to keep useful info. Bakul Shah in freebsd-arm quotes R-Pi forum, but I failed to find original.

Stage 1 boot is in the on-chip ROM. Loads stage2 in the L2 cache!

Stage 2 is bootcode.bin. Enables SDRAM and loads stage3

Stage 3 is loader.bin. Knows about elf format and load start.elf

start.elf loads kernel.img (+ it is the main gpu code). It reads config.txt, cmdline.txt and bcm2835.dtb If the dtb file exists, it is loaded at 0x100 & kernel @ 0x8000 Else if disable_commandline_tags is set load kernel @ 0x0 Else if load kernel @ 0x8000 and put ATAGS at 0x100 See Issue 16 in https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues

kernel.img, is the first thing that runs on the ARM processor.

And more information on config.txt here

U-Boot for Raspberry Pi, step 3

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 14:06:30 +0000

Finally I received my female/male cables for inter-board connects (my soldering skill is close to zero) and got FTDI-based TTL/USB converter work. I had more luck with it then with my old trusty TTL/RS232 converter. No garbage in linux output, serial input works for u-boot.

You can find content of boot partition of SD-card I use here.

Fully functional serial port means that boot-over-serial should work and I do not need to move SD-card between R-Pi and card reader to get new version of u-boot running. So based on this post I managed to automate compile/run/fix cycle to some extent. Not C-Kermit expert here, so the script is lame but it does its work:

U-Boot for Raspberry Pi, step 2

Sat, 26 May 2012 00:36:52 +0000

I had some issues with console output from U-Boot on my R-Pi but Alexander Rybalko submitted patch that seems to fix them. One more issue that needed to be resolved: mysterious hangs in relocate_code. Some digging revealed that system hangs once PC reaches address 0x100. Some more digging yielded that at this address is used by GPU part of loader to store arguments for kernel.

So after tweaking .text offset for u-boot and generating proper image using this tool I finally got:

FreeBSD on Raspberry Pi: baby steps

Mon, 21 May 2012 20:47:43 +0000

Thanks to Robert Watson I got my hands on brand new raspberry pi device (model B) and now trying to get FreeBSD running on it. That turned out to be non-trivial task. For one - there is no way to netboot the board. At least I failed to find it. It seems that initial Linux bring-up was done on evaluation modules with proper bootloader, JTAG support and whatnot and for public use limited boot loader was released. So instead porting FreeBSD on it I face the task of porting U-Boot. Which is not something entirely impossible.

FreeBSD on ARM devices

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 18:20:25 +0000

Damjan Marion published nice how-to for getting FreeBSD running on BeagleBone. Using it I managed to get my PandaBoard ES running off SD card. The only modifications to this instructions are:

Use PANDABOARD kernel config. Stock version is configured to use NFS so it should be modified to use SD card as root.
MLO and u-boot.bin binaries are different. I used these. You’ll need boot.scr too.

Performance is still affected by using write-through caches by default, but this issue should be fixed soon.

FreeBSD/MIPS & clang/LLVM

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 21:49:00 +0000

Now I know a little bit more about clang. I can’t say it’s quite useful for MIPS yet, but it’s nice to see some progress in this field. My findings might be inaccurate and any corrections are welcome.

No proper cross-compilation so far. Clang team plans to do it “right way” but so far it’s just an item on their ToDo list: Universal driver. There are command-line options like -ccc-host-triple to get target assembler code, but names for assembler/linker are hardcoded to as/ld, which puts some restriction on building target toolchain

UPD: -ccc-host-triple does the trick OK

Is it self-hosted yet?

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:18:00 +0000

Good news everyone! Last two days I’ve been testing FreeBSD/mips by running buildworld on netbooted RouterStation with root mounted over NFS. So far so good, it successfully completed twice.

A couple of weeks ago arch-dependent part of libthr (both kernel and userland) was implemented and it seems to work. “Seems to work” means that it passes thr1 and thr2 tests from stress2 and python’s test_thread[ing].py. And yes, python and perl build fine on the same board from the ports do work. As bash et al :) Though perl should be built without Perl malloc but it’s on my ToDo list.

Scheduled for reading

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 00:33:00 +0000

Has just received two books from Amazon.

The first one is Beautiful Architecture by fellow FreeBSD developer Diomidis Spinellis and Georgios Gousios. I bought it because software design is not my strongest skill and there is a lot of place for improvement. And learning from real life examples is always better then reading pure theory.

The other one is The Productive Programmer by David Bock. Productivity is my sweet spot (well, it’s more about cool tips then real productivity boost). This had nice reviews so I decided to give it a try.

FreeBSD/MIPS: something lost, something gained

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 04:01:00 +0000

And again long pause in blogging. In this 4 months several things happened to me: I relocated to Vancouver, was interviewed and rejected by Microsoft (don’t know why they contacted me in the first place), met new people (philip@ and thompa@ among them), saw new places and even got some free time and learned to cook (it turned out to be fun!).

Being close(geographically) to PMC-Sierra, major MIPS vendor, I tried to contact them and ask for a donation for FreeBSD/MIPS project. Got no reply, though. Predictable result, but it’s better to try and fail then have never try at all.