The following is my trip report for the recent BSDCan 2008 conference.
Contacts I made
I met Philip Paeps, Warner Losh, Rafal Jaworowski, Marcel Moolenaar, Joe Marcus Clarke, Andrew Thompson, Murray Stokely, Scott Ullrich from pfSence who I have had contact with previously.
I also met with Adrian Clark at the airport the day after the conference who lent me an OLPC to start porting the FreeBSD loader to.
What I accomplished by attending the conference
- Worked around a bug with ACPI on my Dell laptop where reading from the Embedded Controller could fail leaving me with no CPU fan. This means I can boot FreeBSD on my laptop for more than 5 minutes.
- Managed to get the port of FreeBSD to the NEO 1973 to the point it is running init. More work is needed in the CPU code to get the UART to act as a tty. These changes are in Perforce.
- I discussed with Rafel the current status of the Efika port of FreeBSD/powerpc as I have done most of the previous work to get FreeBSD working on this platform.
- With Rafal and Marcel we started to think about a generic On Chip Bus driver to describe the devices attached to a cpu’s internal bus without having to rewrite generic code too much. We looked into using parts of ACPI to describe the devices as there are already tools in the base system to handle the compliation of it’s description language.
- Creating a new (joke) module, compat_debian, to be compatable with the Debian openssl security issue announced during the conference.
- I started a poert of the FreeBSD i386 loader to the OLPC. It contains a copy of OpenFirmware. The firmware on the laptop I had access to doesn’t however emulate the BIOS.
What I learned
The main things I learned was the around FreeBSD on smaller and embedded systems. The most useful was the changed Rafel has made to U-Boot. I intend to use this work to help the port of FreeBSD to the NEO1973 cellphone by allowing it’s copy of U-Boot to load loader and give users more control on loading and to set kernel arguments.
His other talk helped my understanding of the naming scheme of the various ARM families/architecture versions/cores. Warner’s talk on the history of the MIPS talk was useful as it allowed me to meet with him for the first time and get an idea on his thoughts on what needs to be done for FreeBSD on embedded systems.