Re: Need testers for ALPHA RPi-5 fan control, GE NIC, WiFi drivers for FreeBSD-CURRENT

On Fri, May 29, 2026 at 8:10 PM Jeremy McMillan <[email protected]> wrote:

>
>    1. Testing. I only have one RPi-5 to develop on, and it would be nice
>    to discover any glitches that are hardware revision dependent or use/load
>    dependent.
>    2. Missing features/functionality? I really only needed the fan
>    control and GE NIC for my project (a power efficient ZFS NAS).
>    3. This was written using (very tightly supervised) Claude Code, and
>    will need a rewrite. I could use a mentor and some code review for that
>    once this is past beta status. This is like a prototype, and bits of it
>    should likely be refactored into the existing FreeBSD codebase, like the
>    existing brcmfmac driver, and I'm using what feels like hacky ACPI+FDT
>    because I don't know how to make FreeBSD work with FDT only and the RPi-5
>    ACPI seems half-hearted (ie. enumerates interfaces that don't seem to work).
>    4. How much effort should I put into this, as a hobby, based on
>    interest in the community?
>
>
I'd be happy to review things for you. The way it was written may be OK if
you can explain and stand behind the code. But if it should be integrated
with other code, that may be a moot point. I'd be happy to help mentor as
well.

Warner


> On Friday, May 29th, 2026 at 8:22 PM, Daniel Anderson <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>
> What do you need help with?
>
> On May 29, 2026, at 20:42, Jeremy McMillan <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
>
> If anyone has a Raspberry Pi 5 that's not dedicated to anything important,
> I'd appreciate some help testing this:
>
> https://github.com/aphor/FreeBSD15-RPi5-modules
>
> The README.md is up to date, but other docs in there might be stale.
>
> IDK if I should try to implement Bluetooth yet. I haven't tried using
> FreeBSD bluetooth with working known-good drivers on supported hardware,
> but when this is relatively complete I'm planning to do some bug fixing and
> performance improvements where necessary in a BETA phase, then a rewrite
> from scratch for maintainability that can be submitted to FreeBSD-CURRENT.
> I know the repo says FreeBSD15, but I'm currently building against
> FreeBSD-16-CURRENT. I've had feedback that the fan control works fine on
> FreeBSD-15.
>
> I also don't know what I should do about GPIO testing. I'd appreciate any
> pointers if other people work with RPi hardware and have any pointers for
> testing GPIO stuff. I think there's a few pins that can do DAC and ADC and
> others that can do PWM (like the ones used for the fan header) when
> programmed to different modes. I have an oscilloscope, but I'd like to
> automate testing as much as possible because my spare time is precious.
>
> It seems like RPi-5 will be around for a while under the current market
> conditions for the semiconductor business, and it is my hope that FreeBSD
> can deserve and get more attention and support from Broadcom and Raspberry
> Pi. Also, I have my own projects :)
>
> Thanks in advance for your attention!
>
>
>
>