Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 03:19:53 +0400 From: Alexander Tarasikov <alexander.tarasikov@gmail.com> To: wkoszek@freebsd.org, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: [GSoC 2014] Interested in ARM bringup tasks Message-ID: <CAMChaFxz7t6-UAUL50CsC9vDE%2BubG=9aBYwEy2hSinLWtoDaDg@mail.gmail.com>
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Hello, FreeBSD community! I am interested in participating in GSoC this year and I'd like to pick up one of the tasks related to porting FreeBSD to new architectures. I'm now doing my master's degree in software engineering at the "Higher School of Economics" in Moscow. Since I love ARM and smartphones, I've chosen the project to port FreeBSD to a smartphone. If that task is already occupied (which doesn't seem so), I would be happy to pick up another task suggested by the community. I want to port FreeBSD to the Sony Xperia Z phone. This phone has the Qualcomm APQ8064 SoC which is used in a large number of smartphones, including Google Nexus 4. Besides, Qualcomm SoCs are developed incrementally so there's a high chance that the code for current generation of chips will benefit future revisions as well. It is known that debugging like JTAG and flash recovery is not available on consumer devices because of DRM and general love for obfuscation among the vendors. Therefore, to prevent bricking the device, I suggest using the chainloading approach, that is using the bootloader that ships with the device and pretend to be a linux image. For the mid-term I want to port the u-boot bootloader and add the support for accessing the microSD card from it. The u-boot will be flashed to the device instead of the linux kernel. Since the proprietary bootloader already initializes the display (we can also port linux driver to u-boot), it should be possible, at least during the initial stage, to use a simple driver in FreeBSD that would write to the framebuffer allocated by the bootloader or only write the framebuffer address to the display controller. In the past I've successfully ported linux to an Intel XScale-based Asus P525 smartphone, ported Android with all hardware working to boot from NAND on the Sony Xperia X1 phone and have ported various boards from OEM to vanilla kernel trees. Recently I've experimented with the XNU kernel (the one which is used in the fruity operating system) and ported it to the OMAP5 board. So I think I'll be able to pull it off. Have a nice day! -- Regards, Alexander
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