Re: Beaglebone Black/Green/Blue support (volunteering)

From: Mark Millard <marklmi_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2024 16:43:07 UTC
On Sep 13, 2024, at 08:55, Zach Metzinger <zmetzing@pobox.com> wrote:

> I have a number of these boards and really prefer them to any Pi-thing when I need to throw them out into the field to monitor or control things.
> 
> It was mentioned that support for armv7 was being dropped (or at least it was a consideration) in the current version(s) of FreeBSD. I've built 12.4 and have it running on a BBG; I'm currently building 13.4 to see where it breaks -- I've been told moving to current would be the best way to "revive" support for this board.
> 
> I'd like to do what I can to help keep them included as a viable and supported platform.
> 
> Bare-metal/VxWorks/FreeRTOS C coder by day, so the real challenge is learning the build environment. Not many hours/wk to dedicate to it, but I'll do what I'm able.
> 
> Thanks to FUZxx on freebsd.dev for pointing out this list.

See https://www.freebsd.org/platforms/ .

It lists:

Platform Name   TARGET_ARCH  13.x Support Tier  14.x Support Tier  Projected 15.x Support Tier
. . .
32-bit ARMv6    armv6        Tier 2             Tier 3             Unsupported
32-bit ARMv7    armv7        Tier 2             Tier 2             Tier 2
. . .

So it is just armv6 that recent commits just removed
the code for as far as arm goes.

Basically, armv7 is the only 32-bit platform projected
to be supported for 15.x . The rest are 64-bit.

It would seem likely that 16.x would not support armv7.

13.3-RELEASE included both armv6 (RPI-B) and armv7 (GENERICSD).
13.4-RC?? builds  builds are like that as well.
13.4-STABLE snapshot builds are like that as well.
13.4-RELEASE should be as well.

14.*-RELEASE did not include armv6 but did include armv7 (GENERICSD).
14.1-STABLE snapshot builds are like that as well.

15.0-CURRENT snapshot builds do not include armv6 but do include armv7 (GENERICSD).

See in:

http://ftp3.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/ISO-IMAGES/?C=M&O=D
http://ftp3.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/ISO-IMAGES/?C=M&O=D

A bigger issue might be having all the U-Boot support
operational for your context(s) (?):

https://cgit.freebsd.org/ports/tree/sysutils/u-boot-*

===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com