Re: RPI 4/5 u-boot new port, is there any interest?

On Jun 4, 2025, at 08:12, Patrick M. Hausen <[email protected]> wrote:

Am 04.06.2025 um 17:00 schrieb Warner Losh <[email protected]>:

>>> Seriously, why is there so little interest/engagement with that platform in FreeBSD?
>> 
>> Because Mike Karels died. He was spearheading those efforts, and all the life
>> went out of them (or most of it) when he tragically passed returning home from
>> BSDcan last year.
> 
> I did not know he was so essential for that part of the project. Bless him.
> 
>> [...]
>> I fully recognize this is a supply / demand imbalance. But it's where we are.
> 
> Understood. Thanks for the explanation.
> 
> I remember getting in a bit of an argument with Mike over the recommended
> way to generate a MAC address on a Pi.

Notably, relative to the RPi5 EEPROM content:

rpi-boot-eeprom-recovery-2025-05-08-2712 release notes reports:

QUOTE
    • Implement GET_BOARD_MAC_ADDRESS on Pi5
The Pi 5 EEPROM implements a subset of the original mailbox properties.
Add GET_BOARD_MAC_ADDRESS to the subset.
See: #698
END QUOTE

https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/issues/698 reports:

QUOTE (different authors):
GET_MAC_ADDRESS returns the value chosen for the onboard ethernet interface. That address will come from OTP if found, otherwise it will be derived from the serial number.
. . .
N.B The proprietary vcmailbox interface is not recommended and is somewhat deprecated for values that are already available via device-tree. The OTP mac address can be overridden either in customer OTP rows or via EEPROM config settings.
OTP information can be read from /proc/device-tree/soc@107c000000/nvmem/nvmem_mac
END QUOTE

> Thankfully ronald@ took it to himself to implement the method using the serial
> number. My argument at the time was that we should not give the user a worse
> experience than Linux.
> 
> I wasn't aware the Pi foundation was difficult to deal with if not overtly hostile.



===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com