FreeBSD on AmigaOne X5000

[Justin Hibbits]

Hi Al,

With the device tree addition of the PHY information, on the Linux
cyrus device tree, Ethernet works just fine on FreeBSD, so there's no
problem when using my modified tree.

I also tested today loading the radeonkms driver, and it loaded just
fine, so maybe the crash was a fluke.  It of course needs more
testing.

- Justin

On Thu, Jan 18, 2018 at 8:02 PM, Al Zick <al at familysafeinternet.com> wrote:
> Hi Justin,
>
> I don't know if this helps, but there is work being done to get the X5000
> built in network ports working in both AmigaOS and Linux. I know the issue
> he had/has with the PHY hookups. Honestly, I am not sure which one of you
> are further along, so I don't know if that helps.
>
> I will be installing FreeBSD on my X5000. I will let you know when I get it
> installed and then I will start testing.
>
> Kind Regards,
> Al
>
>
>
>
>
> On Jan 18, 2018, at 12:11 PM, Justin Hibbits wrote:
>
>> Hi Al,
>>
>> FreeBSD runs pretty well on the AmigaOne X5000, but there are some
>> gotchas right now.  It needs a minor change to the dts in order to use
>> the ethernet controller, and you currently have to make an
>> execute-in-place uImage, for 64-bit kernels anyway.
>>
>> The former is impossible to work around, because the device tree is
>> just incorrect with regard to the PHY hookups (it lists TBI
>> connections, but the AmigaOne X5000 uses rgmii, which puts all
>> connections through dtsec0's mdio).  You can find my working device
>> tree at https://people.freebsd.org/~jhibbits/cyrus_p5020_amiga2.dtb .
>>
>> The latter I'm currently working on, and plan to have ubldr loading
>> 64-bit kernels in the next couple weeks, so we won't need to build
>> uImages.  But, for now, the way I do it is:
>>
>> buildkernel with KERNCONF=QORIQ64
>>
>> Using NetBSD's 'mkubootimage' (easy enough to build on FreeBSD with
>> some minor tweaks to the source), run:
>>
>> mkubootimage -A powerpc -C none -T kernel -O linux -a 0x3ffffc0 -e
>> <entrypoint from readelf -h> -N "FreeBSD AmigaOne X5000"
>> amiga64.uImage /path/to/built/kernel
>>
>> Then I can boot that image via either dhcp or sata (Be sure to load it
>> to 0x3ffffc0, for some reason uboot doesn't copy the image when loaded
>> to the default loadaddr of 0x01000000).
>>
>> Booting from SATA you need to create an MBR partition scheme, and the
>> first partition must be FAT, since uboot doesn't know how to read
>> FreeBSD disklabels and UFS.  I made two partitions: 128MB FAT to put
>> the kernel, ubldr, and dtb; and the rest of my disk is a BSD disklabel
>> volume, partitioned like a normal FreeBSD system.  You would put the
>> dtb and uImage in the FAT partition, and set the uboot bootargs
>> environment variable to 'vfs.root.mountfrom=ufs:/dev/ada0s2a'
>> (assuming /dev/ada0s2a is the root you create, as my example is)
>>
>>
>> As for what you can do to help, that depends on your skill set.
>>
>> If you're happy in the kernel:
>> * I have some patches to drm2 so it can load the radeonkms driver, but
>> it crashes due to TLB synchronization issues between the two cores,
>> that might be interesting to look at.
>> * Performance improvements:  CPU0 is seeing a very high decrementer
>> interrupt count, measured with vmstat -i.  I think this might be uboot
>> messing up the clock frequency information populating, but I'm not
>> sure.  Maybe test that.
>> * There are still device drivers missing for things like the XMOS and
>> CPLD.
>>
>> If you'd prefer userspace, once you have FreeBSD installed, and able
>> to use the network:
>> * Build a kernel with ZFS (just add "options ZFS" to the QORIQ config,
>> or create your own), and test building everything with poudriere.
>> Report any bugs and panics you see.  Just hammer away.
>> * It's pretty boringly stable up in userspace, so it's hard for me to
>> think of anything more.
>>
>> Let me know what you're interested in, and I can point you to
>> somewhere you can help.
>>
>> Glad to see interest in this!
>>
>> - Justin
>>
>> On Wed, Jan 17, 2018 at 5:20 PM, Al Zick <al at familysafeinternet.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Would it be possible to find out about how much progress has been made on
>>> the FreeBSD port to the AmigaOne X5000 in the last few months and if
>>> there
>>> is anything that I can do to help?
>>>
>>> Kind Regards,
>>> Al
>>>
>>>
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>
>