Re: FreeBSD for new SOC

On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 7:23 PM Sleep Walker <s199p.wa1k9r@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello FreeBSD ARM community!
>
> I would like to discuss one issue.
>
> A lot of devices have already been sold in the world on Amlogic processors.
> These are SBCs and VIDEO consoles.
> But they all run on Andriod or Linux. No FreeBSD support ;-).
>
> If it had been, the user community would have grown a lot, FreeBSD would
> have grown in popularity, and the number of testers and committers would
> have increased.
> This would make FreeBSD for ARM even more stable.
>
> What are your thoughts on porting FreeBSD to Amlogic?
> Such attempts have been made before
> https://github.com/tomtor/image-freebsd-c2
> NetBSD supports multiple SBCs on Amlogic
> http://www.armbsd.org/arm/
> Why don't we add this support too?
>

Amlogic support was removed last November since there wasn't anyone who
could maintain amlogic related codes:

https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=367993

Ganbold



>
> I know several Chinese manufacturers who would be happy to send samples
> of their products to developers.
>
> I recently received a RADXA ZERO on Amlogic S905Y2 as a free samples
> https://wiki.radxa.com/Zero/hardware
> https://forum.radxa.com/t/introduce-the-radxa-zero/6550
>
> It is a very interesting and tiny device, it comes with Android
> pre-installed on eMMC,
> not even Mainline Linux support yet.
>
> I've been studying FreeBSD for ARM for two years now and really want to
> learn
> add support for new SOCs to FreeBSD.
>
> I now have 3 SOCs to add
> 1) Pine64 Quartz64,
> 2) Radxa Zero
> 3) First Russian ARM SOC - BAIKAL-M
> https://www.baikalelectronics.com/products/338/
>
> In all three variants, I have the necessary equipment.
> And I have a great desire to learn.
>
> I have already written a USB driver for BAIKAL-M and am successfully
> booting the system in multi-user mode.
> The results can be viewed here https://pkg.personalbsd.org/baikal/
>
> It succeeded because many devices on BAIKAL-M use fixed-clock and
> everything is built on DesignWare IP.
>
> But I stopped at the need to write a clock driver necessary for Ethernet
> and PCIe to work.
>
> If anyone would agree to advise me, I would be extremely grateful.
>
> I am willing to provide access to BAIKAL-M but ssh (since USB Ethernet
> works)
> for easier collaboration and learning.
>
> Any help or advice would be appreciated.
>
> I am extremely interested in participating in the FreeBSD porting project
> to the new SOC because I want to contribute to the popularization of
> FreeBSD.
>
> --
> Yours faithfully,
> Sergey Tyuryukanov
>