Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2017 16:03:21 -0400 From: Thomas Laus <lausts@acm.org> To: freebsd-arm@freebsd.org Subject: Re: GENERIC kernel (was Re: BeagleBone Crochet Build Problem) Message-ID: <8eb57091-0b6f-3f0a-8c80-997b951a383f@acm.org> In-Reply-To: <20171003170053.GB2918@lonesome.com> References: <176dbdd5-1a32-06b2-7dd8-0647cc0fbe20@acm.org> <1506954050.22078.55.camel@freebsd.org> <CABx9NuS9XAfWNHM1fAFKV8byhWyv=jXS_W%2BNO3Y6s-CtEQdp6A@mail.gmail.com> <1506962766.22078.69.camel@freebsd.org> <20171003170053.GB2918@lonesome.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On 10/03/17 13:00, Mark Linimon wrote: > On Mon, Oct 02, 2017 at 10:46:06AM -0600, Ian Lepore wrote: >> Why are we working towards a GENERIC kernel for arm? > > My intuition would be: > > - easier to tell new FreeBSD users how to start > - less work for Release Engineering to make targets > > OTOH I'm not doing the work so I don't get to set the > direction :-) > > My _opinion_ is that we still seem to have a steeper > curve for our new users than is necessary. I intend to > think about that more this fall. > That is probably 'wishful thinking' for the very distant future. Most of the common ARM SOC's have very different capabilities between each other. Each also requires a unique U-Boot partition that gets read before the FreeBSD kernel is loaded. I strongly favor the current approach that has a custom kernel configuration file and U-Boot for each SOC. All of the common ARM systems have a limited amount of real estate to store FreeBSD kernel and base system because it all must fit on a SD memory card. Having a GENERIC kernel that covers all SOC variants would consume flash space that will never be used. Tom -- Public Keys: PGP KeyID = 0x5F22FDC1 GnuPG KeyID = 0x620836CF
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?8eb57091-0b6f-3f0a-8c80-997b951a383f>