[nycbug-talk] BeagleBone Update!

[George Rosamond]

On 01/02/13 12:35, Brett Wynkoop wrote:
> Greeting-
>
> The BeagleBone FreeBSD Port is coming along partly due to wonderful
> programmers and partly because I keep testing/breaking/reporting things.

Oh, of course you'll be in the next READE...

;o

>
> My BeagleBone is now running pretty stable, but without USB.  Some of
> the developers seem to think USB should happen in the next few weeks.
>

Yeah, that would be a huge deal, especially for building ports, etc.

> To tease those of you that did not order a BeagleBone here is the
> output of top while running buildworld:
>
> last pid: 32084;  load averages:  1.30,  1.27,  1.24  up 0+09:27:58    12:31:01
> 21 processes:  2 running, 19 sleeping
>
> Mem: 140M Active, 528K Inact, 35M Wired, 18M Cache, 35M Buf, 49M Free
> Swap: 770M Total, 64M Used, 706M Free, 8% Inuse
>
>
>    PID USERNAME    THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU COMMAND
> 32082 root          1  69    0 16000K 15536K RUN      0:02 141.00% cc1
> 32081 root          1   8    0  8812K  8704K wait     0:00 17.94% cc
> 32083 root          1  -8    0  9600K  9396K piperd   0:00 16.00% as
> 25859 root          1   8    0 29340K 29208K wait     0:26  0.00% make
>    644 root          1   8    0 10072K   760K nanslp   0:11  0.00% cron
> 26665 wynkoop       1  40    0 17820K  3452K select   0:02  0.00% sshd
>    449 _dhcp         1  40    0 10124K  1568K select   0:01  0.00% dhclient
>   1213 root          1   8    0  8860K   896K wait     0:01  0.00% make
>    411 root          1  60    0 10124K   748K select   0:01  0.00% dhclient
> 22646 root          1   8    0  8860K  8580K wait     0:01  0.00% make
>   1037 root          1  16    0 10824K  2168K pause    0:01  0.00% csh
> 26649 root          1  42    0 17820K 12748K select   0:01  0.00% sshd
> 23262 root          1   8    0  8860K  8612K wait     0:01  0.00% make
> 26668 wynkoop       1  16    0 10824K 10360K pause    0:01  0.00% csh
>    679 root          1   8    0 10996K     4K wait     0:01  0.00% <login>
>   1055 root          1   8    0  8860K    12K wait     0:00  0.00% make
> 32084 wynkoop       1  43    0 11268K 10092K RUN      0:00  0.00% top
> 22649 root          1   8    0 10440K 10056K wait     0:00  0.00% sh

I pinged Tim Kientzle earlier to offer any assistance we could provide. 
  But probably the best thing people can do is get on the various arm 
lists and start banging away with errors and insights.

This is a living breathing arena in which users testing code can quickly 
translate into better code.

Tim's FreeBSD scripts work for BeagleBone, Raspberry Pi and PandaBoards, 
but there seem to be a bunch of other arm-based boards on the way.

One simple thing to do is hit the /etc/rc.conf in overlay/ for FreeBSD, 
for instance.

A lot of what many of us did on i386 with Soekris, Alix, etc applies.

Certainly enable ntpdate to sync time on boot since there's not RTC 
battery to save:

+ntpdate_enable="YES"
+ntpdate_flags="-b"
+ntpdate_hosts="pool.ntp.org"

And maybe add some other rc stuff:

+rc_debug="YES"
+rc_info="YES"

To minimize disk writes, I also use md(4) in /etc/fstab

/dev/mmcsd0s2a / ufs rw,noatime 1 1
+md /var/log mfs rw,-s10m 0 0
+md /var/run mfs rw, -s5m 0 0
+md /tmp mfs rw,-s40m 0 0

I would use tmpfs(5), but the module doesn't appear to be present, and I 
haven't checked any further.

I will be screwing with arm ports at some point once the usb stack is 
reasonably functional, but I am new to cross-compiling ports for 
different architectures.

At some point I'll post all my little and often insignificant insights 
somewhere.

g