Contributed by tbert on 2013-07-25 from the welcome-to-the-club-now-get-to-work dept.

As some of you may have noticed, the OpenBSD architecture family has two new members, Beagle and Octeon. Jasper Lievisse Adriaanse(jasper@) and Patrick Wildt(patrick@) were kind enough to tell us about their efforts bringing these ports up to spec.

I just tried to get that new ARM stuff running. I based my work on a WIP diff from miod@, debugged its problems to get the systems to boot, fixed some panics and other problems. Also I worked on getting the L2 cache usable, for some additional speed, but that's not enabled in the tree. Plus, I worked on making some drivers more generic, by putting them on a cortex0-bus, instead of having them attach on beagle0 or so. PandaBoard related I have mostly/only worked on EHCI/USB and the drivers which were needed to set it up (clock control, gpio, ...). Future work? I've been working and progressing on: SMP

hard-float userland

"one kernel for them (= boards) all"

flattened device tree support (correlates a lot with the item before)

FreeScale i.MX6 SoC (runs very well)

Samsung Chromebook (Exynos 5250) The first four items will still take a while until I have something stable

and well written for OpenBSD, but it's ongoing (though slow, because

of -ETooManyProjects) work.

OpenBSD/octeon is a port to systems with a Cavium Octeon (Plus) CPU using the MIPS64 architecture. This allows for using a lot of the low level MIPS64 code that's already part of OpenBSD. The port was originally developed by IIJ and imported into OpenBSD in 2010, however a lack of readily available hardware prevented this port from really taking off. Then in 2013 Ubiquiti Networks released the EdgeRouter Lite (ERL) platform which sports an Octeon CPU. This sparked a renewed interest in the original port. The code that was already in OpenBSD was already fairly complete and just needed that final push to make it actually usable. chris@ was friendly enough to send me an ERL as well as CAM-0100 board. The fact that the latter board had a CF slot made this my primary development board as currently it's the only way of having local storage on this platform. In the course of the next few months I worked on fixing various issues and wrote an installer to go along with it. During the t2k13 hackathon I also started working on sorting out the remaining issues with SMP support that was started by syuu@, and I also began working on a real bootloader. Neither of these are finished at the moment; but perhaps by the time OpenBSD 5.5 goes to the CD plant I have more to report on this. There are still some outstanding projects such as USB support and a real standalone bootloader, but generally the port is maturing and 5.4 will be the first official release supporting OpenBSD/octeon.

patrick@jasper@

Octeon hardware is still scarce among developers; do note that there is a request for various unsupported boards that will be able to run OpenBSD/octeon once a developer gets their hands on them.