FreeBSD on RaspberryPi

[Tim Kientzle]

On Nov 11, 2012, at 12:46 PM, Adrian Chadd wrote:

> On 11 November 2012 12:39, Oleksandr Tymoshenko <gonzo at bluezbox.com> wrote:
> 
>> At the moment HDMI output works only in a sense of video output for simple
>> frame buffer. I'm trying to get GPU support ported but not sure how much time
>> it will take. Eventually we'd like to get audio support too.
> 
> How's the general, non-video support working out? Are there any random
> crashes or panics that people are seeing on R-PI right now?


So far, I haven't done very much, but it is stable enough to
natively build a bootable kernel; note the build machine on
my RPi boot message:

FreeBSD 10.0-CURRENT #2: Sun Nov 25 14:23:57 UTC 2012
    root at raspberry-pi:/usr/src/sys/arm/compile/RPI-B arm

The two biggest obstacles right now are:
* Memory.  There's a missing piece in the current boot sequence
   that causes it to always default to 128MB memory.  That makes
   it hard to do much on a generic -CURRENT build.  (The native kernel
   above took a long time; swapping to SDHC is a little slow. ;-)

   Related:  Shipping RPis now have 512MB RAM; I'm pretty excited about that.

* Video console.  You've probably noticed the exchanges on the list.


Apart from that, it's pretty promising.  I'm optimistic that we're
no more than a couple of weeks from having a FreeBSD image
that a lot of folks can just download and use.

Tim