A simple question on arm-port of OpenBSD

dear sir or madam,

       I visit the web page of OpenBSD and have learned
that
it supports some kinds of arm-based machines.

      Although it emphasis on security, would it support
some embedded
computers in the future?
Such as ATMEL AT91RM9200, CirrusLogic EP9315. These chips
contain a internal
ethernet
controller and are used in net communication area widely in
PR. China.

On 9/18/07, PowerMan <powerman1stgmail.com> wrote:
> dear sir or madam,
>
>        I visit the web page of OpenBSD and have learned
that
> it supports some kinds of arm-based machines.
>
>       Although it emphasis on security, would it
support some embedded
> computers in the future?
> Such as ATMEL AT91RM9200, CirrusLogic EP9315. These
chips contain a internal
> ethernet
> controller and are used in net communication area
widely in PR. China.

Uh, it's a more detailed issue than that. So, the embedded
devices you
are talking about run arm presumably, right? In principle,
it could
work. Why don't you take an arm/bsd.rd and try to get the
embedded
device to boot it and report what happens?
As for the ethernet chips, it depends on if the drivers
exist. OpenBSD
supports *a lot* of networking hardware.
You are a developer though, right? If you need to, you could
write
these drivers.
A fair warning: You will get no love from OpenBSD by just
begging for
code to be written; it is a system written by the
developers, for the
developers; they work on what they want to work on.

-Nick

From: "Nick Guenther" <kousuegmail.com>
Subject: Re: A simple question on arm-port of OpenBSD
Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2007 11:39:00 -0400

> On 9/18/07, PowerMan <powerman1stgmail.com> wrote:
> > dear sir or madam,
> >
> >        I visit the web page of OpenBSD and have
learned that
> > it supports some kinds of arm-based machines.
> >
> >       Although it emphasis on security, would it
support some embedded
> > computers in the future?
> > Such as ATMEL AT91RM9200, CirrusLogic EP9315.
These chips contain a internal
> > ethernet
> > controller and are used in net communication area
widely in PR. China.
> 
> Uh, it's a more detailed issue than that. So, the
embedded devices you
> are talking about run arm presumably, right? In
principle, it could
> work. Why don't you take an arm/bsd.rd and try to get
the embedded
> device to boot it and report what happens?

FreeBSD has an Atmel AT91RM9200 port that's complete enough
for my
company to use in their products.

There's 0 chance that bsd.rd will work.  There's no support
for the
serial port or ethernet chips in OpenBSD right now.  There's
no code
tuned to setup the device mappings, etc.

The Cirrus Logics devices have similar issues, but NetBSD
has code for
it in its repo, and FreeBSD has preliminary code available
for it as
well.  You'd have to port the code for these devices,
including the
ethernet driver.  I believe that the CL devices at least
have 16550
UARTs in them, so that's one less thing to port.

> As for the ethernet chips, it depends on if the drivers
exist. OpenBSD
> supports *a lot* of networking hardware.

But not this hardware.  They are custom jobs that need
different
drivers than what OpenBSD has.  Unlike some of the other
embedded
systems out there that use re-hashed versions of older ISA
card
technology, both of these SoCs have their own, home-grown
NICs in
them.

Warner