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Date:      Wed, 24 Apr 2019 12:11:02 +0200
From:      Bernd Walter <ticso@cicely7.cicely.de>
To:        Eugene Grosbein <eugen@grosbein.net>
Cc:        Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>, "freebsd-mips@freebsd.org" <freebsd-mips@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: MIPS future...
Message-ID:  <20190424101102.GK18788@cicely7.cicely.de>
In-Reply-To: <8da9f5d2-e33e-0f55-7f30-3344ccf5f0a7@grosbein.net>
References:  <CANCZdfpK5mPDDgpJ5PVhXF7-MixSouW8mAKkWQcaRnmYW%2Bpy0g@mail.gmail.com> <8da9f5d2-e33e-0f55-7f30-3344ccf5f0a7@grosbein.net>

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On Thu, Dec 13, 2018 at 08:04:17AM +0700, Eugene Grosbein wrote:
> 13.12.2018 1:15, Warner Losh wrote:
> 
> > And then there's the even larger question: how many people are still using
> > mips32? It looks like a fair number, maybe, but I have no idea for sure, so
> > if you do, please provide feedback on the platforms you are running FreeBSD
> > 11 or newer on.
> 
> I have TP-Link TL-WDR4300 https://www.tp-link.com/en/products/details/TL-WDR4300.html
> that is MIPS32 74Kc AR9344 SOC with 8MB on-board flash and 128M RAM
> that successfully boots to multiuser mode using very old FreeBSD 11-CURRENT.

I'm using one of them as an AP in one location with the mini-build.
My other locatin was using an OpenWRT AP, but just yesterday I finally setup
FreeBSD-12 stable to replace the OpenWRT.
It was very tricky to find out what modules had to be loaded to get WiFi
working.
And on how to start them without loader perloading modules.
I finally came up with the following rc.local:
/sbin/kldload wlan_xauth
/sbin/kldload ath_hal_ar9300.ko
/sbin/kldload if_ath_ahb.ko
/sbin/kldload if_ath_pci.ko
sleep 1
/sbin/ifconfig bridge0 unplumb
sleep 1
/sbin/ifconfig bridge0 plumb


> 
> I stopped trying it because its USB support was pretty unstable leading to random panics or just hangs and
> 8MB are not enough for my purposes without extra USB storage for packages and
> I could not even fit FreeBSD 12 base system to its internal flash due to siginficantly increased code bloat
> and ENOTIME to deal with troubles.

Same, the instable USB support was what killed most of my ambitions with that.
This is a showstopper for other boards as well.
Don't know if this specific to atheros, but I've tested several atheros
based boards and USB just wasn't working well enough for a rootfs.
Maybe that has changed since my last test...
Since it is for my own need with existing infrastructure, the TL-WDR4300
is using nfsroot.
However, there are still some issues.
It is bridging to the WiFi, but I like to have isolation.
Since it is nfsroot, I can't use normal VLANs to my gateway.
I should be able to use VXLAN to my normal gateway however.
Routing is not an option as I can't install packages/ports for dhcp:
root@apx1:~ # pkg 
ld-elf.so.1: Shared object "libssl.so.9" not found, required by "pkg"
root@apx1:~ # which cc
cc: Command not found.

The rootfs is via ../root/mips_ap/ build by the freebsd-wifi-build.
Beside the missing cc it looks pretty much complete.
Maybe a normal crossbuild would get me a compiler?

That said, if I can't have a working compiler, I would try vxlan, but still
a working compiler would be nice to have.

-- 
B.Walter <bernd@bwct.de> http://www.bwct.de
Modbus/TCP Ethernet I/O Baugruppen, ARM basierte FreeBSD Rechner uvm.



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