I am still fixing the Cavium Econa CNS11XX network driver with the guide from Pyun YongHyeon. He is guiding to make the network driver more robust. Unfortunately, we still don’t know why the driver is slower than the Linux version. The port is currently accessible through FreeBSD CVS at:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/arm/econa/
I asked in the freebsd-arm mailing list if anyone would like to donate me a CNS21XX device, and Stefan Bethke immediately offered me to buy one for me. I bought the device from dealextreme with the money donated to me. It took 9 days until it arrived.
Meanwhile John Nicolls from ThinkLinx sent me a Hot-e, a device based on AT91SAM9G20. I told him that I have received mr Stefan offer, but he said I can work on it anytime I want it. Since the Hot-e arrived earlier, I have managed to get it to boot. At first i was going to use the work from Sylvestre Gallon on at91sam9621(mailing list archive), but it turns out that it is not usable yet.
I have fixed the clock computation in at91_pmc.c, and currently writing a new timer driver (at91_pit.c), because the system timer device (at91_st.c) no longer exists in AT91SAM9G20. Currently the timer device is still not working properly, but I think I will be able to get it work this week.
When the CNS211XX LAN device finally arrived, I stopped the work for Hot-e for a while to test the new device. I bought a CA-42 cable to connect to it, but I can’t send anything to the device. I thought that the device was faulty, but turns out that the cable is faulty. I was disappointed because usually I used that type of cable (it is cheap only 132 baht or 4 usd). Fortunately I still have one MAX3232, and I can make my own cable.
I think porting CNS21XX will not be so difficult. I made some small adjustment for the serial port driver to make it show something. Memory mapping is different compared to CNS11XX, but that can easily be adjusted. The Interrupt controller is different, so I need to rewrite some parts. After it works, EHCI/OHCI was working fine. The network driver will need major adjustment (may be I will just write a new driver for this one), and the device doesn’t use CFI for Flash, it uses SPI, so I will need to write a driver for SPI bus.
For CNS11XX and CNS21XX You can see my progress in this wiki page:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSDcns11xx
Any luck on the Hot-E porting?
I’m poking around at porting FreeBSD to this: http://www.glomationinc.com/product_9G20i.html
Thanks
@Shelby
Two parts left to finish: Flash access and Audio
you can check my progress here:
http://gitorious.org/freebsd-arm
@yohanes
Awesome! Would donating one of the 9g20i boards help at all? 🙂
I would also like to see a port to the gumstix omap based system, somebody has 8x booting on the beagleboard which is based off the same CPU. Exciting stuff.
@Shelby
I think it will help if the board has more hardware attached to the 9g20i. For example the Thinlinx doesn’t expose the SD Card and USB device capability of 9g20i (i.e: no slot for SD card, and no slot for USB device, only USB host), so I didn’t write code any code for those parts.
The board that you link seems to have those parts (and more).
Email me and let me know where to ship 😀