ARM Support (for SoC's supported by FreeBSD 11) [meltdown & spectre FREE!]

[orangana]

Hello,

once again. Still on the wish list. Maybe not even that hard to achieve :o

FreeBSD supports the following Allwinner SoCs:

    Allwinner A10 (sun4i), a single core Cortex-A8
    Allwinner A13/R8 (sun5i), a single core Cortex-A8
    Allwinner A20 (sun7i), a dual-core Cortex-A7
    Allwinner A31 and A31s (sun6i), a quad-core Cortex-A7
    Allwinner A64 (sun50i), a quad-core Cortex-A53
    Allwinner A83T (sun8i), an octa-core Cortex-A7
    Allwinner H3 (sun8i), a quad-core Cortex-A7

From: https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/arm/Allwinner

The latest in the list (H3) is also the most affordable one with a very nice bang for bucks ratio and is also meltdown and spectre free!

For example this little guy here (Orange Pi R1) costs around USD 13.90 and could go as a very nice road warrior with very decent VPN throughput:



(the used H2 SoC is tecnically a H3: https://linux-sunxi.org/H3#Variants)

And here a link were somebody created a freebsd for two H3 boards: https://framkant.org/2017/07/running-freebsd-on-nanopi-neo-or-orangepi-zero/

I still have hope!  :-*

[mimugmail]

I had a talk with Franco yesterday about this .. we'll dig into this when FreeBSD 12 will reach beta or rc state.
ATM it's too early to build test releases with v12 code base (which supports ARM)

[orangana]

I had a talk with Franco yesterday about this .. we'll dig into this when FreeBSD 12 will reach beta or rc state.
ATM it's too early to build test releases with v12 code base (which supports ARM)

AFAIK right now FreeBSD 11.x is stable (including ARM: https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/arm/) and has support till 2021. Also OPNsense is based on *BSD 11.x right?

And for FreeBSD 12 it's at least one year more to wait  :'(

[mimugmail]

I can't find anything in the link regarding version 11.1 or 12 .. IMHO only 12 has builds for ARM but I'm not an expert on this ...

[orangana]

I can't find anything in the link regarding version 11.1 or 12 .. IMHO only 12 has builds for ARM but I'm not an expert on this ...

I think it's all in already: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/stable/11/sys/arm/allwinner/h3/

I'm sure, it's all inside =)

Support for the Allwinner H3 SoC has been added. [r299688]

Release Notes FreeBSD 11: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.0R/relnotes.html#hardware-arm

[orangana]

I wonder what it takes to build a unofficial beta (or alpha) image for this target. Is there any documentation how to build opnsense 18.1? Is there a build system for it? Is there somewhere some starting point?

Beside FreeBSD there is also native support for Allwinner H3/H2+ SoCs in OpenBSD and NetBSD (if it helps in some way...)

[mimugmail]

It takes time ... lot of ..

Here you can start building:
https://github.com/opnsense/tools#setting-up-a-build-system

[orangana]

one day.. one day..  maybe 18.7?  ::)

</spam>

[mimugmail]

19.1 :)

[orangana]

19.1 :)

...is coming soon :D