I've bee hacking away trying to set up Crochet-BSD to build boot images for Wandboard. Wandboard uses Cortex A9 processor, so it's ARM. The linux distros for it use U-Boot, so that seemed like a likely place to start for FreeBSD.
Looking at the Wandboard Wiki, there is an article on U-Boot which explains how to build U-Boot for Wandboard. Firstly, download the October 2013 release of U-Boot here. If you are building on FreeBSD, you'll need this patch to the Makefile to include libc.
Then, build U-Boot for wandboard:
make wandboard_quad_config make
and copy the imx file to the sd card
sudo dd if=u-boot.imx of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1 seek=1024
This writes the imx file 1K into the disk; which is where the i.mx6 processor expects to find the U-boot image. The processor manual is here. It specifies offset 0x400 as the Program Image start on the SD card. The U-boot startup looks like this:
CPU: Freescale i.MX6Q rev1.2 at 792 MHz Reset cause: POR Board: Wandboard DRAM: 2 GiB MMC: FSL_SDHC: 0, FSL_SDHC: 1 *** Warning - bad CRC, using default environment In: serial Out: serial Err: serial Net: FEC [PRIME] Hit any key to stop autoboot: 1 0 mmc0 is current device SD/MMC found on device 0
Keep in mind that the default serial protocol for Wandboard is 8n1 and 115200.
Once U-boot is started, you will need to boot the FreeBSD kernel. My disk image is partitioned with a FAT partition on which I have kernel.bin, and a UFS partition which is the FreeBSD root file system. kernel.bin is the raw kernel. The partition table looks like this:
Disk: /dev/rdisk1 geometry: 3880/255/63 [62333952 sectors] Signature: 0xAA55 Starting Ending #: id cyl hd sec - cyl hd sec [ start - size] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ *1: 0C 8 5 1 - 58 29 63 [ 16443 - 102375] Win95 FAT32L 2: A5 58 30 1 - 992 1 63 [ 118818 - 1881180] FreeBSD 3: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused 4: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused
You should notice that the FAT partition starts at 16443. I've moved the start of the FAT partition further into the disk to accomodate u-boot at disk offset 0x400.
Once you've got an SD card with u-boot and kernel.bin on it, and you've booted to u-boot, you'll want to start the kernel. At the u-boot console, load the kernel.bin into memory at address 0x12000000.
fatload mmc 0:1 12000000 kernel.bin
The address 0x1200000 is specified in the FreeBSD ARM configuration for Freescale. Check here. Once the kernel is loaded, go ahead and start it:
go 12000000
This will start FreeBSD:
KDB: debugger backends: ddb KDB: current backend: ddb Copyright (c) 1992-2013 The FreeBSD Project. Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. FreeBSD is a registered trademark of The FreeBSD Foundation. FreeBSD 11.0-CURRENT #0 r259276: Thu Dec 12 17:20:23 MST 2013 tom@bernice:/storage/home/tom/crochet/crochet-wandboard/crochet-freebsd/work/obj/arm.arm/storage/home/tom/crochet/src/FreeBSDHead/head/sys/WANDBOARD-QUAD arm FreeBSD clang version 3.3 (tags/RELEASE_33/final 183502) 20130610 Preloaded elf kernel "kernel" at 0xc24afdac. CPU: Cortex A9-r2 rev 10 (Cortex-A core) Supported features: ARM_ISA THUMB2 JAZELLE THUMBEE ARMv4 Security_Ext WB disabled EABT branch prediction enabled
In my case, I've run into a kernel crash starting the kernel, so I don't have a fully working system yet, but I do have a working boot loader. The Crochet-BSD code to build an image file containing USB, a partitioned disk image, kernel.bin and the userland is here: