Re: Poudriere friendly armv7 relases

On Mar 20, 2023, at 13:28, Glen Barber <gjb@freebsd.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 20, 2023 at 02:06:50PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
>> Greetings,
>> 
>> Since it looks like we're going to retain at least armv7 for FreeBSD 14
>> (armv6 has been nominated for deprecation, but if it isn't deprecated, all
>> this applies to it).
>> 
>> I'd like to start making at least the base.tgz, etc available for armv7.
>> This would allow us to create armv7 poduriere jails without building from
>> source.
>> 
>> Is there some reason we're not doing this today? I know ISOs don't make a
>> lot of sense in the arm ecosystem, but having these artifacts would enable
>> poudriere binary install support.
>> 
>> Comments?
>> 
> 
> Several.  :)
> 
> I have looked into this in the past, and mhorne@ had even added some
> environment knobs to the way armv7 is built, however I later realized
> that it was not 1:1 compatible with how base.txz, etc., are generated
> for other architectures.
> 
> 1) For other architectures, base.txz is result of the 'ftp' target in
>   /usr/src/release.
> 
> 2) armv7 does not have an 'ftp' target.  (Well, it does not *disallow*
>   it, and probably should at the immediate moment, but it does blow
>   up.)
> 
> 3) Most importantly, and the reason I stopped looking further into this,
>   we cannot run native armv7 binaries on an amd64 system (at least,
>   last I was aware).

Does chroot and the like count for your purpose?

armv7 packages are built without qemu or the like's
involvement:

default   131releng-armv7 on ampere3
quarterly 131releng-armv7 on ampere1
default   main-armv7      on ampere2

This has been going on since 2022-Aug or so.

I personally build for armv7 on a HoneyComb
and have done so on a RPi4B in the past. (This
is both system builds and package builds.)

Basically all these machines support AArch32
in addition to AArch64:

# sysctl kern.supported_archs
kern.supported_archs: aarch64 armv7


> Particularly, we can only actually use what is
>   listed in kern.supported_archs,

The ampere*'s should list armv7 in addition to aach64.
(I've no access of my own to directly validate but
given that ports are turned into packages . . .)

> at least without falling back to some
>   sort of emulation or wrapper support (such as qemu or the like).

Should  not be needed, presuming access to have
jobs run on one or more ampere* systems.

> Back when armv6 and armv7 support was added using shell scripts instead
> of hooking into release/Makefile, having a base.txz did not make much
> sense because there were different environment variables that were
> passed into the resulting output, some of which affected the loader
> output, etc., specifically with regard to u-boot.  I am not sure if this
> is still an issue or a concern, however.

QUOTE
author Emmanuel Vadot <manu@FreeBSD.org> 2021-05-11 18:27:14 +0000
committer Emmanuel Vadot <manu@FreeBSD.org> 2021-05-11 20:22:54 +0000
commit 0d6e5081eb0080c4703f1c5cc69c34f38d9149b7 (patch)
tree a22f954f3003c1361f4ea5a411e92759a80c9089 /sysutils/u-boot-master
parent c5fd1c2e186abb2e3209fa48d75d8dcdcda63f06 (diff)
download ports-0d6e5081eb0080c4703f1c5cc69c34f38d9149b7.tar.gz
ports-0d6e5081eb0080c4703f1c5cc69c34f38d9149b7.zip

sysutils/u-boot-*: Remove ubldr support

We have been using loader.efi on armv7 for a long time now. Remove support for booting with ubldr and the needed patches that were never upstreamed. While here add CONFIG_EFI_GRUB_ARM32_WORKAROUND=y in the Fragment as it's needed to have the cache flushed for us when loader.efi is started. 
END QUOTE


So: before 2021-Jun.

> That said, I can take a look and see if we can package base.txz for
> armv7, however I would like to do some archaeology work here to be sure
> that the resultant output is not going to have unexpected behavior
> because of the userland not matching 100% the target SoC.


===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com