Re: Build for Intel iXP420 board?

On Thu, Dec 10, 2020 at 2:10 PM Brett Glass <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hello!
>
> I recently disassembled some radio equipment which the FCC will no
> longer to allow me to use (they auctioned the frequencies that it
> used to run on out from under me and other wireless ISPs) and
> discovered some ARM boards inside that I would like to reuse for
> other embedded applications. They are "Avila" boards, made by
> Gateworks, and appear to follow the Intel evaluation/reference
> board design for the iXP420. A couple of them have only 4 MB of
> available flash, but some have 8 MB.
>
> I've found an old port for these boards; it's described at
>
> https://openwrt.org/toh/hwdata/gateworks/gateworks_avilagw2348-2
>
> and seems to boot. But OpenWRT is weird and awkward, and worst of
> all, it's Linux! I would prefer to be running one of the BSDs on these.
>
> I've discovered that the boot ROM is Redboot, which means that I
> can TFTP and flash a properly formatted image if one exists. Is
> there an ARM build of FreeBSD that's likely to work on this style of board?
>

FreeBSD 9 or 10 or maybe 11 is your best bet. 'gateworks' I think is what
you want to search for in the sources, not avila, but maybe you can use
both to find them. The armv5 port was removed from FreeBSD because it had
bit rotted too much. I used to run FreeBSD 8 on these boards as a wireless
access point shortly after Sam committed the code to the tree. I've had
good luck with FreeBSD stable/10 on other arm gear, but there's been
reports of issues on stable/10 with unaligned I/O causing problems for some
cache topologies.

Warner
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