Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2016 16:15:17 -0700 From: Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> To: John.Kitz@xs4all.nl Cc: freebsd-arm <freebsd-arm@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Creating FreeBSD/arm bootable SD card for Cubieboards from FreeBSD 11.0 image files for Wintel only users. Message-ID: <CANCZdfpDF_58Mv7LE7MtNz7MnA9Tx15%2B=HGQK77pVc_6%2BAwAHw@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <58322974.4e47620a.75a76.9c91SMTPIN_ADDED_BROKEN@mx.google.com> References: <58306c9b.4e79630a.a07d9.cf58SMTPIN_ADDED_BROKEN@mx.google.com> <CAGtf9xNqs4awP8MZP1gLtWsycZBYVaAuyGFtC_P=wWnJv78Awg@mail.gmail.com> <58309eb5.9942620a.e27b3.24f7SMTPIN_ADDED_BROKEN@mx.google.com> <CANCZdfpu8cVqBu5-B7wH0Aqf6OEKbsUCgX2W-XgbVDRponw9Bg@mail.gmail.com> <583197f2.11e2630a.2d4ed.1acfSMTPIN_ADDED_BROKEN@mx.google.com> <CANCZdfrhES57YPAfse%2BRBj4EZcTPy1HURkk0RhsMU8M_Uovjow@mail.gmail.com> <58322974.4e47620a.75a76.9c91SMTPIN_ADDED_BROKEN@mx.google.com>
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On Sun, Nov 20, 2016 at 3:53 PM, John W. Kitz <John.Kitz@xs4all.nl> wrote: > Warner, > >> In lieu of the availability of an image file for one of the more recent = Cubie products I am planning to give it a try on a cubieboard2. > > You're unlikely to have a good day doing that. > > JKi: Please elaborate. The names "FreeBSD-11.0-RELEASE-arm-armv6-CUBIEBOA= RD.img.xz" and "FreeBSD-11.0-RELEASE-arm-armv6-CUBIEBOARD2.img.xz" do sugge= st that these particular images are specifically aimed at cubieboard 1 and = 2 hardware or am I overlooking something? You're right. The CUBIEBOARD kernel is for the A10-based cubieboard. These are rather hard to obtain these days (I had to look around to find one at a reasonable price). Cubieboard-2 is easier to find, since it is the A-20-based one. The difference between these two images is that the A10 one is UP while the A20 one is SMP, so the kernels are different. I suspect that the cubieboard 3 may work with the proper u-boot and dtb file, since it too is based on the A-20. The cubieboard 4 might or might not work. We have support for the A83t in the kernel and some A80 support for the A80 specific clock configuration, but I've not tried it, nor have I seen reports of others that have. There is a dts for it, so it should be easy to test out. >> Does anybody on this list happen to know if future FreeBSD releases are = planned to include images for more recent Cubie hardware? > > Which specific hardware? In the embedded space, there's no standardizatio= n, so even minor variants can need their own u-boot. We may have a u-boot = ready for that... > > JKi: At this point either the cubieboard 3 or 4 seem to suite my requirem= ents best, but given that the image naming convention does seem to suggest = that there is no image available for either yet, I thought I'd give it a tr= y using the cubieboard2 first. If you have a cubieboard2, the FreeBSD-11.0-RELEASE-arm-armv6-CUBIEBOARD2.img.xz image, when decompressed, will work for you. IF you have a cubieboard3, it may kinda work or not (not sure how specifically compatible the two boards are, and at this level the differences matter). However, all is not lost. I believe that you'll be able to copy the cubieboard3 dtb to /boot/dtb of this image, and use a cubieboard3 u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin that u-boot can produce. If you'd like to go this route, I can help you as well. The u-boot port is likely super-easy since the version of u-boot we base all the Allwinner ports on is new enough to support it w/o further patches. I'm less sure about the cubieboard 4. As for our plans in the future as a project, we're coming to grips with needing to have so many images around. This simply doesn't scale. So there's many efforts underway right now. The first of them is to create a GENERIC kernel that can boot on all this different hardware. Many of the boards have been converted over to this scheme already, though not all of the code has been merged into stable/11. Next, we're unifying the wild-west of ports that are in the tree today. This effort is something I'm coordinating, and hopefully will be done by the end of the year. As you can imagine, there's a lot of testing to do here across a broad range of hardware. Unfortunately, you need a specific u-boot for each board type (with some minor exceptions among closely related boards). Finally, there are efforts underway to ensure we can create one image that can trivially be flavored to boot on all the hardware we support. This is less well defined at the moment, but we're looking to put all the possible u-boot images onto the image, as well as providing a method to flavor the image once it is downloaded and placed into a SD card, but before it has been put into the target. These efforts are currently on the drawing board. Hope this helps Warner
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