Building kernel and ports on i.MX6 platforms

[Brett Glass]

Everyone:

I am interested in using some tiny i.MX6 systems as Internet 
routers and firewalls. However, to do this, I need to compile my 
own patches into the mpd5 utility. I may also want to compile a 
slimmed-down kernel to save memory, as well as a special Netgraph 
node I've created.

Unfortunately, the SD card images, as supplied, come with neither 
kernel sources nor the ports collection. What's more, there have 
been significant improvements to the ARM code since 11.0-RELEASE, 
and I may want to work with snapshots (which the freebsd-update 
utility won't update and which confuses the heck out of the 
bsdinstall utility; I haven't been able to use that utility to 
fetch the ports collection). What's the best way to build custom 
kernels and/or patched ports for this platform? Should I 
cross-compile or compile natively? If I do the latter, how best to 
bring in the ports collection and keep my kernel sources up to date 
on a system that's running a snapshot?

--Brett Glass