GENERIC kernel (was Re: BeagleBone Crochet Build Problem)

[Thomas Laus]

On 10/03/17 13:00, Mark Linimon wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 02, 2017 at 10:46:06AM -0600, Ian Lepore wrote:
>> Why are we working towards a GENERIC kernel for arm?
> 
> My intuition would be:
> 
>  - easier to tell new FreeBSD users how to start
>  - less work for Release Engineering to make targets
> 
> OTOH I'm not doing the work so I don't get to set the
> direction :-)
> 
> My _opinion_ is that we still seem to have a steeper
> curve for our new users than is necessary.  I intend to
> think about that more this fall.
>
That is probably 'wishful thinking' for the very distant future.  Most
of the common ARM SOC's have very different capabilities between each
other.  Each also requires a unique U-Boot partition that gets read
before the FreeBSD kernel is loaded.

I strongly favor the current approach that has a custom kernel
configuration file and U-Boot for each SOC.  All of the common ARM
systems have a limited amount of real estate to store FreeBSD kernel and
base system because it all must fit on a SD memory card.  Having a
GENERIC kernel that covers all SOC variants would consume flash space
that will never be used.

Tom


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