SOEKRIS image for FreeBSD-11

I recently got a Beaglebone Black.   I was very excited; it’s similar to a Pi, but has 60 GPIO ports! Getting a serial console up on it was not quite a simple as I thought, since the BeagleBone uses FTDI.  Following the instructions here I installed the OS X serial driver for FTDI.   After plugging…

I recently got interested in the technical details of how ARM OS’s work, so I decided to try my hand at writing a simple one.  This blog post is not about the OS itself, but about setting up the development environment. In my case, I’m developing in a terminal session, on FreeBSD 10 on an…

Crochet-BSD is a github project which supports building FreeBSD disk images for various platforms such a RaspberryPi, BeagleBoard and others.  I had a Soekris 4501 laying around, so I decided to extend Crochet to build images for it. So, firstly, I needed a kernel.  Building the kernel config for Soekris is explained pretty well here….

Building a FreeBSD kernel for Beaglebone is not terribly difficult.  Firstly, you need the FreeBSD-Current sources: svn co http://svn0.us-east.freebsd.org/base/head /src/FreeBSD/ Next, build the cross-development tools for FreeBSD: cd /src/FreeBSD/head make XDEV=arm XDEV_ARCH=armv6 xdev Then get Crochet-FreeBSD.  This is by far the easiest way to build a FreeBSD kernel for Beaglebone git clone git://github.com/kientzle/crochet-freebsd.git Once you…

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…

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:…