Re: building armv6 bootable media

On Apr 22, 2024, at 15:10, Mike Karels <mike@karels.net> wrote:

> On 22 Apr 2024, at 16:06, Warner Losh wrote:
> 
>> Hmmm, if this is -current, then armv6 has started to be unwound...
>> 
>> thermite.sh was in the releng repo... I can't find it now... and kyle on
>> irc said my memory might be faulty and thermite was just a wrapper around
>> release.
>> 
>> Warner
> 
> I don't think you want thermite.sh; it is used to build all of the
> architectures in parallel for snapshots and releases.  But -current
> doesn't have a conf file for armv6.  Older releases (including 13.3)
> or stable/13 have a config file for RPI-B that probably could serve
> as a template.

So far as I know, the FreeBSD kernel was only designed to handle the
RPI-B for armv6. That in turn involves the RPI-B's firmware and
U-Boot being involved before FreeBSD, not just FreeBSD. The RPI-B
firmware might make live changes to the .dtb file contents that it
loads. The RPI-B firmware is not arm code but some Broadcom code,
as I understand. (Until more recent times, arm cores in RPi*'s were
slave processors to the Broadcom video core hardware.)

The more I think about this path, the more it looks unlikely to be
readily used.

> Mike
> 
>> On Mon, Apr 22, 2024 at 2:53 PM Lexi Winter <lexi@le-fay.org> wrote:
>> 
>>> Warner Losh:
>>>> On Mon, Apr 22, 2024 at 2:30 PM Lexi Winter <lexi@le-fay.org> wrote:
>>>>> after running 'make -C release NO_ROOT=yes release' for arm.armv6 i
>>> have
>>>>> the following files:
>>> [...]
>>>>> none of these appear to be bootable media
>>> 
>>>> IIRC, arm stuff was built by thermite and not the release script.
>>> 
>>> thanks, i guess that explains why i don't get a bootable media.
>>> 
>>> i'm trying to boot an armv6 GENERIC kernel under qemu to test my PR:
>>> https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/pull/1124
>>> 
>>> could you recommend the best way to do this?  duckduckgoing "freebsd
>>> thermite" doesn't return any results that look relevant.
>>> 
> 

===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com