FreeBSD Moves Along On ARM Support

While Linux continues to move along quite briskly on ARM hardware support and already has 64-bit ARM AArch64 support, that's not the case in the BSD world. With FreeBSD, they're still working on bringing up ARMv6 support and pulling in support for the different ARM SoCs/boards.

There's a new blog post from this weekend going over the FreeBSD ARMv6 support state. Various FreeBSD ARM issues were overcome in 2012 and they open-source OS has also progressed on switching to EABI and enabling LLVM/Clang compiler support for ARM rather than relying upon GCC.

In 2012, FreeBSD was also brought into a working state on the popular Raspberry Pi development board. The OMAP4 PandaBoard is another ARM platform working reliably now with FreeBSD on ARMv6 (not ARMv7).

For now the FreeBSD developers working on ARM enablement are seeking out stability and performance out of currently-supported platforms before expanding onto other ARM tasks. "First - experimental and unstable state of FreeBSD/armv6 in general. It's no fun adding new hardware support when you're not confident in underlying subsystems stability. "I flush cache for this TX descriptor but is it really gets flushed?". Been there, no fun at all. That's why I believe task #1 for nearest future is maximum performance and rock-solid stability of what we have."

The developers for now also aren't looking at GPU/graphics support on ARM. "Fix these two issues should make bring-up process easier. It leaves us with question of GPU support. But it's different story for different post..." This isn't a huge surprise and likely will not see any progress for years with it not being until the release of FreeBSD 9.1 days ago that there was even Intel DRM/KMS driver support and there's still no Nouveau/Radeon DRM driver ported to FreeBSD mainline.