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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. ...

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

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.

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.

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.

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. ...

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 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

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: ...

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>