[talk] new ARM board running FreeBSD

[Jim Thompson]

> On Jun 1, 2016, at 2:08 PM, Charles Sprickman <spork at bway.net> wrote:
> 
> On Jun 1, 2016, at 5:08 AM, Sujit K M <kmsujit at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> On Wed, Jun 1, 2016 at 12:13 PM, Jim Thompson <jim at netgate.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I know that talk@ loves ARM boards running BSD.
>>> 
>>> At Netgate we’ve been playing around with ARM for a while, and we have a new board to tell you about.
>>> 
>>> uFW (microFirewall) is a lot like a Beaglebone Black, but with two 1Gbps Ethernet interfaces.
>> 
>> Really nice to know. What interest me is that whether you have built a
>> custom kernel or some patches.

Subsequent to my message last night, pfSense is now running on the board.
https://twitter.com/gonzopancho/status/737918774582579200

a close inspection of the bootlog will show a couple issues that need to be addressed:
https://gist.github.com/gonzopancho/df6f0730fa54fec0d782eea00d7653a0

(some of these affect Intel on FreeBSD 11, so they’re not all due to what we’ve done to get FreeBSD 11 and pfSense (2.4-DEV) running on this board.

pfSense has a set of patches, and most of them are in the 2.4-DEV tree.  The couple that aren’t are related to the support for captive portal in ipfw.  We have an
internal debate on how to best address these.

Specific to your question, there are patches e.g. to make the on-die switch behave as two discreet Ethernet devices, but these went in the FreeBSD tree back in March
https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/commits/23a2d5f59362b8a60462708280c89083bb8d1b27/sys/arm/ti/cpsw/if_cpsw.c

There is a dts file for the board, because it is slightly different than a straight-up Beaglebone Black derivative.

>> I would love to see the patches you might have applied to HEAD.
> 
> Yeah, it will be interesting to see if this makes it to OPNsense, I would imagine they’d have interest in ARM as well.

For the obvious reasons, I’m not here to talk about what OPNsense does, or does not do.

> What’s the price point on this device going to be?

I know what the board costs are.  We’re not ready to announce pricing.  It’s certain to be lower than any other board we sell.

Jim

> Charles
> 
>> 
>>> We booted FreeBSD -CURRENT on the board earlier tonight.  Links to a gist of the bootlog and a photo are in:
>>>       https://twitter.com/gonzopancho/status/737874921435594753
>> 
>> The boot log seems really impressive if its only an custom build only
>> with no patches, my favourite DHCP seems
>> to be working.
>> 
>> Another thing I would like to point out is Beagleone is that once I
>> was using Linux, there is some thing known as
>> Cyclic test which lets one test the RT Linux Kernel. I don't thing
>> there is something similar to that or I am ignorant.
>> But would love to see that in FreeBSD.
>> 
>>> 
>>> pfSense for this platform is under active development.
>>> 
>>> Cheers,
>>> 
>>> Jim
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> talk mailing list
>>> talk at lists.nycbug.org
>>> http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> talk mailing list
>> talk at lists.nycbug.org
>> http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
> 
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at lists.nycbug.org
> http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk