Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Fri, 23 Nov 2012 20:20:42 -0800
From:      Oleksandr Tymoshenko <gonzo@bluezbox.com>
To:        grenville armitage <garmitage@swin.edu.au>
Cc:        freebsd-emulation@freebsd.org, freebsd-arm@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD-CURRENT on Qemu-emulated Gumstix Verdex?
Message-ID:  <50B04B1A.8090907@bluezbox.com>
In-Reply-To: <50AFEAC5.6040607@swin.edu.au>
References:  <50AFEAC5.6040607@swin.edu.au>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On 11/23/2012 1:29 PM, grenville armitage wrote:
> All,
>
> Apologies if I have the wrong lists, feel free to redirect me.
>
> I recently decided to try getting an arm build of 10.0-CURRENT 
> (r243319) (TARGET=arm KERNCONF=GUMSTIX-QEMU) running inside a 
> Qemu-emulated Gumstix Verdex board, using qemu-devel (1.1.1) as the 
> emulator.
>
> Short version: I fire up qemu-system-arm with "-m 768" to make sure 
> there's enough virtual RAM. u-boot reports the emulated Verdex board 
> as having 256MB of DRAM (I believe this limit is imposed by u-boot). 
> But when control passes to FreeBSD the kernel prints the usual 
> copyright messages, detects the CPU type ("PXA27x step C-0 (XScale 
> core)"), auto-detects 512MB of real memory rather than 256MB and 
> promptly panics (with "panic: vm_page_insert: page already inserted").
>
> The problem appears to be FreeBSD auto-detecting twice the emulated 
> available RAM. Does this ring any bells with anyone? My google-fu has 
> so far failed me.
>
> (I've been contemplating trying this for awhile, since noticing 
> sys/arm/conf/GUMSTIX-QEMU was added to head earlier this year. 
> Admittedly GUMSTIX-QEMU relies on GUMSTIX, which notes it is for the 
> Basix and Connex boards. So I recognise that the answer when emulating 
> Verdex boards might simply be "don't do that".)
>
> FWIW, this is a side project to get an emulated ARM environment 
> running on my amd64 box for building ARM Ports. I've also tried 
> booting the same kernel using Qemu's emulation of the Gumstix Connex 
> board -- this does seem to work, but the emulated 64MB RAM is too 
> tight. 
> (http://matrossi.blogspot.com.au/2011/09/freebsd-arm-on-qemu-in-virtualbox.html 
> was my early motivation for doing this.)
>
> FWIW#2, the actual console output during a failed boot: 

AFAIU you can't specify just any memory size for PXA2XX-based boards 
since they've got strict SDRAM configuration format.

 From quick glance it seems that FreeBSD's SDRAM size detection code 
thinks that there are 4 banks of 128Mb.
While the same MDCNFG register value(0x8ad30ad3)  is used in U-Boot 
source to indicate 256Mb memory size.
So I  assume our code is broken for PXA270.  If anybody got a datasheet 
for it - please take a look, or send datasheet my way.




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?50B04B1A.8090907>