Marvell Kirkwood - anyone?

[Balanga Bar]

To be honest, I would try installing 8.2 if I could find instructions for
building it...

Would I need to install 8,2 on my PC to build 8.2 for FreeBSD/ARM?

On Wed, Apr 17, 2019 at 12:07 AM Ian Lepore <ian at freebsd.org> wrote:

> You say "All I want is updated instructions to build".  Then you point
> out you managed to get a build done, and what you really want is
> support for a kernel panic.
>
> I'll reiterate:  there is no support available anymore for these
> systems.  The only reason the code still exists in freebsd is because
> some users reported they were still having some limited success using
> kirkwood-based systems (that was a year or two ago).  Your report of
> mysterious panics is pretty much in line with what you'd expect for
> code that is no longer being maintained.
>
> It's a sad thing.  I still use dreamplug systems myself, I have to for
> $work.  But we run freebsd 8.2 on them, because that's the last version
> that I know was really stable.  Everything later than that I've tried
> (even 8.4) fails in a variety of mysterious ways from panics to data
> corruption to failure of fsck to preen disks after a crash.
>
> -- Ian
>
> On Mon, 2019-04-15 at 09:10 +0100, Balanga Bar wrote:
> > All I'm really looking for is some update for a number of web pages
> > including https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSDMarvell
> > which show how to build FreeBSD for the platform. The build process
> > seems
> > to have changed somewhat over the last few years and instructions do
> > not
> > mention which version of FreeBSD is being used.
> >
> > Since I already have a couple of GoFlex Home units I would like to
> > try and
> > get FreeBSD installed on them. It seems that people managed to get
> > FreeBSD
> > working on these as long ago as seven years ago, so I'm only trying
> > to
> > recreate something that has already been done, but getting a working
> > build
> > installed is proving somewhat problematic.
> >
> > The most frustrating things is that when I manage to create a build
> > which
> > will boot, there is generally a kernel panic soon after, and the
> > system
> > will not subsequently boot and I don't know how to identify why this
> > occurred.
> >
> > On Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 4:12 PM Ian Lepore <ian at freebsd.org> wrote:
> >
> > > On Wed, 2019-04-10 at 06:23 +0000, Balanga Bar wrote:
> > > > Is anyone using any Marvell Kirkwood devices?
> > > >
> > > > I'm trying to build a reliable system, but am struggling to make
> > > > it
> > > > work.
> > > > Could do with some help on the correct way of building it.
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > >
> > >
> > > To be honest, the Kirkwood stuff is all but completely unsupported
> > > at
> > > this point.  A few people over the past few years have reported
> > > some
> > > success with it.  My own experience is that no armv4 or v5
> > > platforms
> > > have really worked reliably for many years.  When it does work for
> > > people, they're just lucky that they're not running into any of the
> > > bugs that are known to exist in the old arm support.
> > >
> > > Basically the problem is resources: there is nobody both willing
> > > and
> > > able to support the old armv5 stuff anymore.  The company I work
> > > for
> > > used to put their resources into supporting old arm chips, but
> > > we've
> > > moved on to armv7 stuff for the current products, so I don't get to
> > > spend $work hours on armv5 support anymore.
> > >
> > > So all in all, you're really better off with some newer armv7 or v8
> > > (64-bit) hardware.  It's cheaper and more powerful, but you do miss
> > > out
> > > on one thing that Kirkwood supported: dual GigE ports, which just
> > > don't
> > > seem to exist in the modern arm world.
> > >
> > > -- Ian
> > >
> > >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > "
>
>