New FreeBSD Wandboard Image

It’s been a goal of mine for a while to understand how FreeBSD device drivers work.  So, firstly I wrote a simple module; it’s here.  The next step is to write the skeleton of a device driver.  That is, a device driver that does nothing.  The resulting source code is here. The Makefile is very…

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:…

I’ve been building FreeBSD-CURRENT images for my Pi, and I’ve noticed I have this: ugen0.5: <vendor 0x7392> at usbus0 So, it turns out I have one of these plugged in, and it seems likely that the unknown USB device is ugen0.5.  So firstly, there is the question of “ugen”.  You can read about it here….

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…

I often have a need for a fresh FreeBSD install, to host a server, or perhaps just experiment with. My usual solution is FreeBSD jails. However, I’ve recently gotten interested in Ansible and AWS. There are quite a few advantages to installing infra with AWS, however the one I’m most interested in is automating the…

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…