Orange Pi One

[Russell Haley]

On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 2:24 PM, Milan Obuch <freebsd-arm at dino.sk> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> today I got this cheap board. After verifying it works with provided
> linux based image I am trying to put FreeBSD on it. I would like to
> understand boot process, but I did not find much info yet.
>
> Analysing image I see there are two partitions, first one being FAT
> despite gpart telling both partitions are linux-data... and it seems
> there are just two files important, script.bin and uImage in root
> directory.

It seems to be somewhat explained here:

http://linux-sunxi.org/Manual_build_howto

script.bin is a hardware description file and uImage is (of course)
the Linux kernel. It sounds like the specific instance of u-boot for
the Orange-pi is maintained by the sunxi group and loads the kernel
directly from fat instead of from the rootfs.

The specifics of your board seem to be here:
http://linux-sunxi.org/Xunlong_Orange_Pi_One

After some poking the FreeBSD info is here:

http://linux-sunxi.org/FreeBSD

What a  nice little community page. Sure makes Allwinner specific
stuff easy to find!

> As both files are binary, there is nothing more to reveal from cursory
> view and I am going to look for more details on www.orangepi.org page,
> just would like to know if someone already did something. If yes,
> please let me know - I have no problem building kernel and userland
> binaries, but first I need to get a way to load kernel...

It doesn't look like the Allwinner H family of processors is supported
at all by FreeBSD.

http://linux-sunxi.org/FreeBSD

and my limited hardware understanding tells me it's a very different
beast from the A10/A20 (meaning lots of work to port).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allwinner_Technology

BUT if you're interested, here is the starting page for Allwinner stuff:

https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/arm/Allwinner

Either way, I'll hazard a guess that if you can place the FreeBSD
kernel in the fat partition and update the u-boot environment
variables with the file name and address, you may be able to get a
kernel to load but that's just the first hurdle because (probably)
nothing is going to work.

Cheers,

Russ