Hello from Tokyo.
Today we had a developer summit at AsiaBSDCon 2008. We talked about a number of items. We talked about the FreeBSD/mips: it is booting multiuser. We'll be committing to FreeBSD soon.
We talked about ways to making it easier to have parts of FreeBSD be optional, with the default being 'on'.
There's this ugly hack which allows one to test the suspend/resume paths of drivers. Check it outthis patch.
20080320
D-LINK DIR-615 B2 hardware
If you go buy a D-LINK DIR-615, make sure that it is hardware revision A1. Hardware revision B2 has less flash (only 4MB) and RAM (16MB) and a completely different processor: Ubicom IP5090U cpu. This CPU uses a new instruction set (ubicom32) that isn't supported by any open source operating system that I could find. This is also the previous generation of the ubicom processor. The IP51xx is the latest generation of processor, and evidentially its only used on the DIR-655.
A good place to look for information about what processors and radios are in the different access points on sale now, including version information, can be found over at small net builder with information about the D-LINK DIR-615 B2.
A good place to look for information about what processors and radios are in the different access points on sale now, including version information, can be found over at small net builder with information about the D-LINK DIR-615 B2.
20080318
D-LINK DIR-615
The other day I saw that Target was selling the D-LINK DIR-615 draft N router for $50.00 each. Since it had been a while since I purchased a wireless router to hack, I bought one. It turns out that this was a wise choice.
This router chip has an 88F5180NB1 CPU. This is a Marvell Orion SoC. Support for this family of processors is coming into the tree shortly.
There's a FS28F640 flash chip on board. This is a 64Mb/8MB of memory. With compression, FreeBSD can fit into this size. There appears to be 32MB of RAM, which is also enough to run FreeBSD.
There's a 88E6061-LAJ1 PHY chip which should be relatively easy to program.
Finally, it has a mini-pci slot with a 802.11n card based on the 88W8361P-BEM1 chip. Maybe a driver for this chip will come along. I've not investigated the GPL tarball to see if there's a driver in source for this, or just a binary module.
There's a GPL tarball available at the D-Link web site.
Finally, there's two interesting connectors. One looks to be a JTAG connector, the other looks to be a serial port.
My next step is to look into what's coming out of the serial port and what's in the GPL tarball for hints while I'm waiting for the Orion support to come into the tree.
This router chip has an 88F5180NB1 CPU. This is a Marvell Orion SoC. Support for this family of processors is coming into the tree shortly.
There's a FS28F640 flash chip on board. This is a 64Mb/8MB of memory. With compression, FreeBSD can fit into this size. There appears to be 32MB of RAM, which is also enough to run FreeBSD.
There's a 88E6061-LAJ1 PHY chip which should be relatively easy to program.
Finally, it has a mini-pci slot with a 802.11n card based on the 88W8361P-BEM1 chip. Maybe a driver for this chip will come along. I've not investigated the GPL tarball to see if there's a driver in source for this, or just a binary module.
There's a GPL tarball available at the D-Link web site.
Finally, there's two interesting connectors. One looks to be a JTAG connector, the other looks to be a serial port.
My next step is to look into what's coming out of the serial port and what's in the GPL tarball for hints while I'm waiting for the Orion support to come into the tree.
20080316
FreeBSD/arm on a Linksys NSLU2 (slug)
Thanks to some encouragement from Gavin Atkinson, I have been able to boot the AVILA kernel on my Linksys NSLU2 (slug). I have it running of NFS root at 266MHz. Not super fast, but not too bad. I need to clean up a bunch of stuff still, but at least I have the basics working.
I'll post more in a few days, once I get a chance to clean up what I have and submit it to CVS. But this is very exciting...
I'll post more in a few days, once I get a chance to clean up what I have and submit it to CVS. But this is very exciting...
20080312
Buffalo LinkStation PC-L4PWAP
Today I'm writing about the Buffalo LinkStation PC-L4PWAP. It was on clearance at Circuit City, so I thought I'd take a chance and pick it up. At the very least, I'd have a new 'receiver' on my network to play tunes through at parties.
I cracked it open when I got it home. There's a Phillips PNX-1520E processor running at 300MHz inside. A quick web search turned up that it has a TM3260 CPU core with a lot of perripherals (I2C, PCI, IDE, etc). The TM3260 is a CPU from Phillips that is a VLWI processor. I had rather hoped when I saw pnx that it had one of their MIPS cores in it. But no such luck.
I didn't bother looking at the amount of memory or the amount of flash on the board once I discovered it wasn't MIPS based. I guess I'll have to content myself with listening to the music it is spooling off a uPNP server on my network... once I get one of them setup. I'll report back on how well it works.
I cracked it open when I got it home. There's a Phillips PNX-1520E processor running at 300MHz inside. A quick web search turned up that it has a TM3260 CPU core with a lot of perripherals (I2C, PCI, IDE, etc). The TM3260 is a CPU from Phillips that is a VLWI processor. I had rather hoped when I saw pnx that it had one of their MIPS cores in it. But no such luck.
I didn't bother looking at the amount of memory or the amount of flash on the board once I discovered it wasn't MIPS based. I guess I'll have to content myself with listening to the music it is spooling off a uPNP server on my network... once I get one of them setup. I'll report back on how well it works.
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