FreeBSD embedded (mips, powerpc, arm) update

The last week or so has show a spike up in FreeBSD embedded platform work. Fixes for mips and powerpc have gone into the tree. Support for a new ARM platform is getting ready to be committed. FreeBSD/mips is almost self-hosting in the svn tree (it has been in the p4 tree for some time). FreeBSD/powerpc and FreeBSD/arm continue to mature.

Thanks to a flurry of activity over the weekend by David O'Brien, the number of patches needed for FreeBSD/mips has been reduced to a set for libpam and for binutils. David cleaned up the diffs for gcc and pushed them into the tree in a manner that allows for easier upstream committing.

In addition, David has cleaned up a number of dangling nits in the build. This is the result of a slight mismatch between p4 and the code in FreeBSD's svn tree. Oleksandr Tymoshenko has looped back most of these changes into p4, and is working on resolving the conflicts that were generated. Once this is sorted out, Oleksandr or myself will generate a new set of diffs and go for the final push into the tree.

I'm looking forward to having a good base for FreeBSD/mips in the tree. I've been busy with a number of other projects and haven't given it the time that I really want to give.

On the PowerPC side of the ledger, Marcell Moolenaar and Rafal Jaworowski have been polishing uboot boot loader support in the FreeBSD/powerpc subversion tree. In addition, some bug fixes to and code polishing of the low level Book E PowerPC support have been committed. Many of these improvements were obtained from Semihalf consulting.

On deck to be committed soon is support for Marvell's Orion NAS chips. This code has been in perforce for a while now and is nearly ready for the FreeBSD tree. I'll keep everybody posted when that happens. I hope to have my DLINK DIR-615 Rev A1 working by then with this code, but time has been tight and there's already too many different projects afoot in my life.