FreeBSD-Wandboard r266864

How the FDT works In specific, I’m looking at this file bcm2835.dtsi which contains the hardware definitions for the BCM2835, the SOC which powers a Raspberry Pi. Primarily, i’m interested in how to read it.   To really make sense of this, you should have this pdf at hand; it’s the hardware manual for BCM2835.  If…

Recently I found myself wanting to understand how I2C for FreeBSD ARM, on the Pi works.  The first step is to understand the GPIO implementation on Pi, since on a Pi, I2C is implemented on the GPIO. So, here’s the basic summary. Firstly, the FreeBSD source browser is here. In the directory /sys/ is the…

I got interested in building my own wireless point after seeing some of the wireless firmware issues like this.  Besides, I’ve always been interested in embedded devices and FreeBSD. So, the first step was a device.  I chose to use a Wandboard.  I’m a committer to Crochet-FreeBSD, so I built out the device support for…

A new FreeBSD Wandboard build is available here and the boot log is here. This build uses U-Boot 2014.07.

Some time ago I was part of the effort to add Wandboard support to Crochet-FreeBSD.   I wrote a blog posting about it here.   An explanation of how Crochet-FreeBSD boots the Wandboard is below: The Wandboard uses U-Boot as its initial boot-loader.  A number of patches to the U-Boot source are required, and you…

I’ve been learning about FreeBSD kernel development, and discovering that, not surprisingly, it’s very, very slow to compile on a Raspberry Pi.  So, I decided to figure out how to compile the Pi kernel on a nice fast AMD-64. Firstly, get the kernel sources to a subdirectory under a non-root user profile: mkdir fbsd cd…