New FreeBSD Wandboard Image

I’ve been making FreeBSD-Current builds for my Raspberry Pi.  Naturally I wanted to try out the GPIO support to find out just how simple it is to use.   Here’s an example, and the full code is here. int main (int argc, char *argv[]) { char *device = “/dev/gpioc0”; int gpiofd = open(device, O_RDWR); if…

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…

Adding Wandboard support to Crochet-FreeBSD has been a project of mine for a while.  After this fascinating kernel fix, I can now build a working image and boot FreeBSD-Current.   Here is an example boot log, and here’s an image file. The output of dmesg, with a USB wireless adapter in the board, is: KDB:…

The FDT is the “Flattened Device Tree”, a simple device tree used in embedded FreeBSD, for example on a Pi.  Every architecture has a DTS file, which contains a human-readable list of hardware for that architecture.   For example, the Pi FTD is here.  You should notice that there are declarations for: cpu axi (the…

My preferred server OS is FreeBSD. Each time I install it, I have to go through numerous steps to secure it. So, to avoid that effort, and to make sure I get it right each time, I’ve created an Ansible playbook to automate the entire process. You can learn about it here. Some of the…

Having built FreeBSD numerous times, I thought it would be interesting to know how to build NetBSD.  The instructions from the NetBSD documentation are here. Firstly get the sources.  An easy way is to simply FTP them.  I got the NetBSD 6.1.2  sources from here.  These files are all tarballs, so they’ll need to be…