Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2019 09:58:50 -0600 From: Ian Lepore <ian@freebsd.org> To: Johannes Lundberg <johalun@FreeBSD.org>, freebsd-arm@freebsd.org Subject: Re: raspberry pi 4 Message-ID: <551442d20b86697759baaf250ddfe6e7eaf2c423.camel@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <2aabd4ed-67b8-0ea3-5616-fb4f1d418ba0@FreeBSD.org> References: <20190709161243.GC4904@mon.zyxst.net> <HZPxf8oyosxDF2kVxJHXYBDY9ULZtF5VHU8FnEslTS9JS-dMsA1G61OnXEHmL0xUVPqZTeF2Q_Z9F58Su81uDDiX86do5d3mqFG7q4teJlw=@protonmail.com> <CAHxjC0-VJmQK=feqAb2H9sSAwHXo8=KTYr3Os72WBB58SaoiMg@mail.gmail.com> <20190710031750.GB28522@lonesome.com> <5fcba83d-2207-accc-ab33-a33085c80753@FreeBSD.org> <35ec822f78362b6b88e25f399fddcf501a327722.camel@freebsd.org> <2aabd4ed-67b8-0ea3-5616-fb4f1d418ba0@FreeBSD.org>
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On Wed, 2019-07-10 at 12:19 -0700, Johannes Lundberg wrote: > On 7/10/19 11:10 AM, Ian Lepore wrote: > > On Wed, 2019-07-10 at 10:30 -0700, Johannes Lundberg wrote: > > > On 7/9/19 8:17 PM, Mark Linimon wrote: > > > > On Wed, Jul 10, 2019 at 09:52:43AM +0900, Denis Polygalov wrote: > > > > > but please let's enhance support of the good OS (FreeBSD) > > > > > on a *good* boards. > > > > > > > > Despite any technical advantages or disadvantages, RPI has the most > > > > mindshare, and we would be foolish to avoid it. > > > > > > Indeed. SBCs come and go. They are EOL before we even have a boot > > > prompt. Personally I would like to see a joint effort focused on one > > > board and make that work really well. Maybe an incentive would be the > > > foundation throwing money at it in the form of rewards for well defined > > > sub projects. The one most likely to survive longest is RPI but there > > > might be other valid alternatives as well. Thanks to Emmanuel's efforts > > > maybe Pine64 is a good alternative? I'm happy to help with graphics if > > > we would do such focused effort but as long as we're all over the place > > > I don't see much point in contributing with the limited time I have... > > > > > > Please note, this is not criticism in any way and I'm not trying to > > > diminish the work developers do on these boards. Everyone is free to > > > work on what they want. Question is, do we want a single board computer > > > that's actually usable for something or only as tinker toys? Without > > > direction, I'm afraid they will always be half working tinker toys due > > > to the limited amount of developers we have. > > > > > > If anyone disagrees, I welcome your point of view. > > > > > > > What you call a "half working tinker toy" is what we use to build and > > ship a dozen different products at $work. > > My apologies if I offended anyone. I didn't know that we had such good > support that you could actually ship products based on it. Maybe I ask > what board that is? > > We use Freescale/Nxp imx6 SOMs from Boundary Devices, SolidRun, and Technexion (Wandboard's upstream vendor). Usually we design our own carrier/motherboards and mount the vendor SOMs on them. Sometimes we're able to just directly use the vendor's carrier boards when we don't need an fpga or other highly customized stuff on the board. The products we build are all related in one way or another to precision timekeeping. I think I'd sum up the state of freebsd arm32 support like this... RPi and Beaglebone. These are "legacy" boards that were the first ones to run freebsd when we started adding armv6/7 support. There weren't that many boards available back then and often the developer/eval board cost hundreds of dollars, whereas these were cheap and easily available. All the current arm32 devs hate working on the crappy old code for these boards and pretty much only apply fixes, reluctantly, as needed or requested by users. imx6. These are pretty well supported because I get paid to support them. Audio and video support is weak because we don't use those at $work (and I don't have a strong personal interest in those areas). The most important thing that's missing is pcie support. Allwinner. Originally these boards were barely supported, because docs were hard to get. Something changed and the docs became available, and several developers adopted the family out of personal interest, so it's currently the most-complete and best-supported arm32 family on freebsd. Marvell. Supported by the folks at Semihalf, mostly because people pay them to do so. The 32-bit marvell world isn't very active these days. The other arm32 things basically range from "supported, but not much ongoing activity" to "nobody has touched it for years, hard to call it supported". -- Ian
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