Updated FreeBSD-Wandboard bootloader

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…

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….

Image file here.  

I’m upgrading the U-boot version used for Wandboard by Crochet-BSD.    The first step is to upgrade the Device Tree Compiler (DTC); there are instructions here. Once you have the U-boot 2014 source, the build is trivial: gmake SED=gsed HOSTCC=cc CROSS_COMPILE=armv6-freebsd- wandboard_quad_config gmake SED=gsed HOSTCC=cc CROSS_COMPILE=armv6-freebsd-  

Image is here.    Boot log is here.

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:…