FreeBSD on Layerscape/QorIQ LX2160X

[greg at unrelenting.technology]

May 25, 2020 1:05 AM, "Dan Kotowski" <dan.kotowski at a9development.com> wrote:

>> Booted with NetBSD -current
>> What was the panic? How about with the NVMe drive?

(is your mail client eating quote levels sometimes? these shouldn't be both >>)

>> I've sent a link to a known firmware build before:
>> https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yXSS1O1U8CmtwaIPfxNDkzhAClJGvErK/view
>> Have you tried it? Any difference in FreeBSD/NetBSD, with NVMe?
> 
> Okay, lots of stuff here...
> 
> https://gist.github.com/agrajag9/7a1164387994cecea50170e2d93e257e
> 
> 1. The latest build didn't get far at all, no matter what hardware combo I threw at it. Something
> about the GIC...

Sorry, silly error (missed {}) when inserting debug prints all over the place.

Could've tried the previous build with that firmware already ;) but new build, should be fixed:

https://send.firefox.com/download/8b82b78a44456587/#KVNvzEyBbiZJkJdhiPfbDg

> 2. NetBSD was... non-deterministic? The first time I tried booting it died real quick:
> 
> But it sees the NVMe stick AND both the root sd card and the firmware sd card! And I was able to at
> least read their geometries with fdisk! Progress!

Okay so first of all:

does NetBSD's ability to work with NVMe change when you swap firmware between your build and the linked one?

(repeat the experiment a couple times, we're doing Science here :D)

> I also decided to just go back to the stock u-boot + LSDK 19.09, just to grab the console output
> during boot. Sure enough, it does see the HDD and NVMe drives. I tried it with the UEFI, but of
> course the Debian image I flashed was MBR...

UEFI supports MBR, generally (there is an MBR partition type).
Actually the current FreeBSD/aarch64 images on Amazon EC2 are MBR (for no good reason lol)

And Linux kernels often have the EFISTUB option on, which means you can directly run the kernel as an EFI binary..
though an "LSDK" build might've turned that off. Also I'm not sure how that works with the initramfs stuff that linux distros use.