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

On 5/29/26 17:42, Jeremy McMillan 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 <https://github.com/
> aphor/FreeBSD15-RPi5-modules>
> 
> The README.md is up to date, but other docs in there might be stale.

A question: Are these changes done in a form that works with the RPi5
firmware and its interfaces? That firmware runs on a different processor
and cannot be disabled as far as I know. If I understand right, for
example, the RPi5 firmware never gives up on providing some thermal
control --not that I know details if that is correct. As I understand
EDK2 does not disable the RPI5 firmware but still interacts with it.

(My wording is likely poor for identifying which firmware is being
referenced. I'm trying to reference the same firmware that deals with
the early boot and reads things like the config.txt and loads the
appropriate *.dtb and, sometimes, *.dtbo files and so on.)

> 
> 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!


-- 
===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com