I was browsing through an article over at CNXSoft regarding the Raspberry Pi and the in the comments section,amongst the talk about thermal issues, I noted this particular post from the user everest3333, referencing this.
Does it indicate that AMlogic are assisting with video decoding for a future kernel?
looks like basically Aml is approving redistribution of some code being used by maxime on the malis and trying to get them into the mainstream kernel. I think stuff from the lima project which is 400/450 Mali.
just a quess tho.
I don’t think its so much LE dictating Kodi’s direction… Kodi’s just really trying to clean up old code trying to make the overall project better managed moving forward, theres alot of old and redundent code from over the years as well as they’ve kinda decided to off-load certain parts into other areas moving those responsibilies to the ones looking after that part, one of the actions in doing so is the removal of some proprieatary stuff and Amlogic falls into that area.
That being said i think LE is playing up the opportunity to kinda be the poster boy in conjunction with Kodi as the small embedded devices is a big piece of the Kodi pie. When it comes to some over on LE i think there more Kodi members then LE which is why theres a shift in the feel of that place now. Theres a lot of coinage looking forward in the future when it comes to embedded devices and now that the sbc markets starting to smolder i think theres alot of behind the scenes moves going on between those 2 projects but who knows for sure…
Just my 2 cents.
There is quite a lot of FreeBSD for ARM development going on at the moment…
and FreeBSD arm cortex-a53 does exist since it will run on a Raspberry Pi 3 which uses this processor.
Each of the BSD has seen a lot of arm work recently. There are also development images for some amlogic devices, in particular those from hardkernel. Nothing production ready, but a good start. Currently on phone at work so can’t easily provide links.
While researching the idea last night i did see a few different works in progress using freebsd, one was the odroid-c1’s, and did come across some others that were trying to get it working on the S912’s but looked incomplete in a lot of ways. but your right in saying theres been a fare amount of work on Arm’s on the freebsd platform.
actually now while looking again as i was gonna post the link i see that post is pretty much abandoned but did see others asking about Amlogic support but not many really answering…
aw… linux is linux and if it works on other linux platforms theres really not much stopping it from happening other then will power…
I’m sure things are a long way from completion, but how would I go about building something which would get as far as the loader prompt? I managed to build FreeBSD for Armv5 so I imagine the process is similar…
For Armv5 I used something along the lines of
make -j 8 buildworld TARGET_ARCH=arm -DWITH_FDT
make -j 8 buildkernel TARGET_ARCH=arm KERNCONF=DB-88F6XXX
What would I do if I wanted to try and get something working on an S912?
Its been along time since i even looked at FreeBSD so i need to see where they have it and where to pick it up, but give me a few days and i will try and answer what i can…
I’ve already forked the main repo and have a couple of workstation boxes kicking around that i can do Intel install and then see where i sit with the arm stuff… my normal build system for years has been based around CrossTool-ng , but i am also in the middle of learning Yocto which is what i used to build my toolchain for the Slackware build i have running on a RockPro 64.
Outside that tho i can’t really see it being a impossible idea as i already have my own linux os running on 5.3 custom kernel i built based on the upstream 5.3 build and its currently running on about a dozen T95U Pro’s which are S912’s as well as the RK3399’s in the RockPro 64’s.
leave it with me for the rest of the week, tho.
Here’s a good place to start… just dd the following to a USB stick and boot…
It gives you the option of installing or running a live image.
Great!
wow… talk about compression… i downloaded the arch64 img for the Pine64 and the Rpi3 from that server with them both being under 340meg but once uncompressed they are both over 2.7gig in size… musta thrown everything including the kitchen sink into those releases. i didnt think for a arm version they would be quite the big…
and they still got the sparc box releases… holy crap time to dig out HAL… i had no idea they were still making builds for those boxs… i guess oracle must still be using them.
I’m not that familiar with the ARM offerings, but they should have a range of images depending on what you want on the media. Looking at the aarch section in the official repository here;
https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/arm64/aarch64/ISO-IMAGES/12.0/
I see there’s a minimal image that’s about half a gigabyte and another one that’s about a gigabyte. Difference is whether you include the source or not. Probably the device specific images include source. Yes and that xz compression is very efficient, that’s why they use it.
hopefully were not straying to far from the topic or i will be getting shit again… lol…
anyways it seems theres only a couple of us yapping in this thread …
I found a rpi3 and a beaglebone image for sd cards there and am gonna test them just to have alook as well as i downloaded the virtualbox images for the aarch64 as well.
worse comes to worse i have no problem investing the time to build the arm stuff as even on the linux stuff the arm stuff wasn’t all that great back then either.
one question you may be able to help me with would be have you ever tried running any of the emu’s on freebsd even on a regular pc running FreeBsd or any of the BSD’s?
curious as to whether they run or will need work. its been many years since i messed with the emu engines themselves (XBMP Days) but off the top i cant think of any reason why they shouldn’t but i could be missing something as its been years.
Wish I could help you there.
I use FreeBSD on PC to compile and use an ARM system called OpenTX without issue, but have not used an emulator to test it.
I also use the full Linux compatibility mode FreeBSD offers to run Linux apps. Did you know about that? Anything you can run on Linux you can run on FreeBSD.
I forgot about the compatibility mode but was pretty sure from a binary executable they generally will run on either. And i am pretty sure even from a driver level they get along pretty well… i member in the way back days taking a cyclades driver i had for sco and sticking into linux and freebsd and it worked… cyclades was a active serial port box that gave me 64 serial ports on each box, that was in my internet days when i had about 200 9600 modems on freebsd and linux boxes created as terminal servers.
Freebsd is really more of a whole unix os where the kernel’s part of the overall system and not like linux which is really just linus’s kernel thats unix compatible and the rest of the stuff is just kinda added to create the distro.
Im just keep researching for the next day or two but thursday when im home im gonna stuff a couple of the newest emu’s on the beaglebone or rpi and see if they work, so i know what to expect.
thanx…
sofar i can’t see any real reason that this can’t be made to work but the lack of any real headway or interest in the idea worries me a bit and makes me think i am missing something…
without doing a lot of checking other then to see if they actually load i did check out the release 12 image they have for the beaglebone and the raspberry and they at least booted up ok…
tomorrow when i am at home i am going to start with a pc install of 12 and see if kodi runs or theres going to be issues with it. Ive seen people say that have at least krypton on release 12 but also a few other bsd based graphical installs… So i think thats the 1st thing that needs to be proven one way or another, cause without it i am not sure its worth all the work.
Yes that’s one of the things I really like about it. The guys doing the kernel and the guys doing userland are on the same page. You’ll see that when you get into the nuts and bolts and see how much better things are organized. I think a big part of the chaos in Linux/GNU is the fact it’s not just one organization, but all kinds of different entities working on stuff. Most of time they’re doing their own thing.
I would agree as well… i think originally it wasn’t as bad as its become over the years and its lead to such a fractured state as you say and for anyone trying to do front to back by themselves or in a small group its gotten way to out of hand… thats partly another reason why a few of us just stay amongst ourselves as with all that kaos comes way to many socializers that detract from some of the real work… sometimes i am amazed at some that litterally on-line on some forum sight pretty much 24/7 actling like they know everything… i don’t know about you but i know how much time i have and theres no way i could sit on a sight telling people what to do all day long and still find time to actually do any coding or hardware or real work… over the years with all the separation of peices in linux its just getting worse everytime… sometimes to many is not really a good thing…
man i am so glad you brought up the whole Freebsd thing as i had long forgot about it and just become part of the Linux mess.
Tomorrow im home for the rest of the week and plan on getting Freebsd up and working on a box here and then put a gui on it and see if i can compile and get Kodi working on it. Thats the make or break point for me on whether or not this is worth the effort… so far from reading tho it looks promising as i have a few things saying it works at least a some level… if i can compile it then i am sure it can be made to work.
I can’t say much on Kodi and FreeBSD other than it’s in the ports tree so it can be built and tweaked if so desired. I haven’t tried it on FreeBSD yet. When I get a new machine and load up 12.0 I’ll have a go with it and see how it does. Otherwise let me know how it works if you have a try with it.
pkg install -y kodi
will install 17.6
tvheadend and oscam are also available, but no Tvheadend HTSP client. A DVB-S2 driver will probably be a problem although webcam may help
https://wiki.freebsd.org/WebcamCompat
also…
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