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.
> 
> 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!

QUOTE
Add to your FreeBSD device tree (typically at
/usr/src/sys/arm64/broadcom/bcm2712-rpi-5-b.dts):
END QUOTE

FreeBSD has never used RPi* device trees based on the ones in the
FreeBSD /usr/src/sys/ area (copied from linux mainline): only binary
ones copied directly or indirectly from the RPi* folks (the RPi*
upstream). (The sources are available.) The same is true for what the
two RPi5 EDK2's provide: *.dtb files and *.dtbo files from the RPi*
upstream, both in binary form.

My limited understanding is that they are (were?) not the same in
various ways --but I do not know the details.

The modern RPi5 *.dtb files include the RPi* folks RP1 description.
(I have converted the live representation of the time to text in the
past, not that I remember the details.)

I've no clue what the consequences of mixing such might be or if use of
a device tree overlay might help avoid such questions.

I'll also note that the RPi* firmware makes some live adjustments to
what is handed to EDK2 and EDK2 may well make more for what is handed to
the FreeBSD EFI loader. Some of that is not from overlays.

Anyway, I was surprised at the reference to the copy of the linux
upstream *.dts .

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