Porting NetBSD to Allwinner H3 SoCs

blog.netbsd.org

65 points·zdw··10 comments

> We wrap the kernel in a U-Boot header that claims to be a Linux kernel; this is no accident! This tells U-Boot to use the Linux boot protocol when loading the kernel, which ensures that the DTB (loaded by U-Boot) is processed and passed to us in r2.

Hah, reminds me of Linux pretending to be recent versions of Windows to ACPI code.

It's funny how Linux became the Windows of ARM.

Nice job. Ethernet still isn't mainline for H3 and the linux kernel. I'm quite tempted to try this.

Hopefully there isn't much to do to make it run on H5. H5 is a much better CPU

The versioning on ARM confuses me frequently, but there is one hopeful line in the article:

> In addition, I've added support for other Allwinner SoCs (sun8i-a83t, sun6i-a31) to the kernel and have tested booting the same kernel across all 3 SoCs.

The H5 is a member of the sun50i family. It's a 64-bit CPU, so this generic image will never work. FreeBSD has done some recent work on the H5 though, so maybe that'll land in NetBSD soon.

I wouldn't say "will never work". H5 is a Cortex-A53 and NetBSD can boot these just fine in aarch32 mode. The RPI2 kernel for example supports all models (32- and 64-bit) of Raspberry Pi except for the original.

FreeBSD did not do recent work on H5, I would know as it would have been me :) But we should run on it without too much effort (I have hardware, now I need time)

Oof, apologies. I'd have sworn I'd come across some H5 FreeBSD work recently, but clearly was mistaken.

Nice!

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