# FreeBSD on Cubietuck



## vlotho (Jul 13, 2017)

hi,

I saw in the wiki that normally, the allwinner socs were managed by freebsd, but I do not see any mention of the cuibietruck in the wiki. is this true ?


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## drhowarddrfine (Jul 13, 2017)

Has anyone else ever heard of them before? I had to Google for it. There is no link to any Wiki on their home page. Haven't a clue what "allwinner socs" is. What are you talking about?


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## vlotho (Jul 13, 2017)

https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/arm/Allwinner
https://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page
http://cubieboard.org//?s=cubietruck
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubieboard#Cubietruck_.28Cubieboard3.29


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## ronaldlees (Jul 14, 2017)

I looked at these boards.  At the time, documentation was pretty terse ... language barrier, etc.  Don't know if it's gotten any better.  The cubieboard1 and cubieboard2 had on-board SATA controller and on-board audio, which I thought was interesting.  But, Like I said, the support was a question for me ...

Maybe it's improved.


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## fil (Sep 4, 2017)

Hi all,

I have one of these devices running with SD card. 
My observations so far (which are minimal at the moment) :

I've build nanoBSD with latest sourcess (12.0 ?), just minutes ago. 
1. At first glance HDMI device driver is (I guess) started, but there is no framebuffer, just some crappy graphic output on the monitor.
2. I've not try SATA yet (read somewhere that it has power problems, don't know if they are resolved by now).
3. Serial debug line is ok for in/out to/from uboot/ubldr/kernel/console. You will need 3.3V to RS232 line transceiver to use it.
4. LAN is ok.
5. I saw some USB drivers loading at boot, but haven't try them yet.

Details about nano image :
1. u-boot package from ports "u-boot-cubieboard2".
2. dtd file is build from : src/sys/gnu/dts/arm/sun7i-a20-cubietruck.dts
using those instructions : https://www.bidouilliste.com/blog/2015/11/28/Porting-FreeBSD-to-a-new-ARM-Board-Part-2/

Unfortunately boot process is rather complicated, so I've used small custom script to init SD card partitions and to load them with required stuff.
Apparently there is no easy way to boot image directly from freeBSD partitions on these devices, and u-boot require small FAT16/32 partition, and some other stuff written to specific SD card locations.
https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/arm/Allwinner

I've also try pre-build images (https://www.freebsd.org/where.html for cubieboard2), they appear to work too, but I don't know to what extent, and I haven't notice their SD card layout.

If someone is interested, I can zip my entire project with source files.

Regards,
Filip


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