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The FreeBSD FDT, the Raspberry PI SPI
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…
FreeBSD Wandboard, new build with multicore
The FreeBSD ARM team have completed the work to support multicore on ARM. You can read the announcement here. I’ve made a new build of FreeBSD ARM for Wandboard, which you can download here. The dmesg output is here, and here is the sysctl showing four cores [Kroot@wandboard:~ # sysctl -a | grep hw.ncpu hw.ncpu:…
FreeBSD-wandboard build 269149
Available here.
The mystery of uart0
The FDT file for Raspberry Pi, declares UART. I’ve had quite a bit of trouble understanding how declaring a uart in the FDT results in /dev/tty0 and /dev/cuau0 appearing in /dev/ Here are the relevant lines from the FDT: uart0: uart0 { compatible = “broadcom,bcm2835-uart”, “broadcom,bcm2708-uart”, “arm,pl011”, “arm,primecell”; reg = <0x201000 0x1000>; interrupts = <65>;…
Bootstrapping pkgng on FreeBSD ARM
There is no official pkgng repo for FreeBSD-arm, yet. There is an unofficial one, here, however in order to use it, you have to have pkgng installed. As far as I can tell, the only way to install pkgng on ARM is to builds and install from source. On the platform I’m using, Wandboard, the…
Spelunking the Crochet-FreeBSD Wandboard boot
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…