Re: When will FreeBSD support RPI5?

On Fri, Dec 29, 2023 at 06:05:25PM +0100, Jesper Schmitz Mouridsen wrote:
> On 29.12.2023 05.55, ykla wrote:
> > Hi, When will FreeBSD support RPI5
> https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/raspberry-pi-5-status.91406/

  Having ordered my RPI5 ~11/28, I think it has a shipping guesstimate in late
Jan/early Feb.  It looks like someone is working on uboot, which FreeBSD seems
to favor (I think the argument I retained was "it works for lots of things,
piggyback on those efforts rather than have some RPI-unique thing).  Then once
you start getting things properly enumerated to where you can load the kernel,
then you work on the kernel drivers.

  RPI seems to favor linux support first, and I suspect that there is a fair
amount of GPL issues that you might have to worry about creeping into the BSD
kernel.  So not as simple as reimplement from what you see in linux.  I know
there are a lot of strong opinions on video drivers, for example, but for that
to even ben an option it'd have to be something that could be a module that
could be packaged outside of the BSD base.  I only bring that up because I've
had garbage luck trying to get serial consoles to work properly on RPIs when
they're competing for things like cooling fans and such, so graphics console
is nice, even if it is just very basic.

  How have people been chicken-n-egging the initial setup?  I know there have
been uboot issues in the past.  Seems like you basically have to build memstick
style images and see if they boot.  Is there a bhyve/QEMU setup that is a
generic test setup that is used?