• BuildingMIPS

Building FreeBSD-MIPS

General build instructions

You will need the proper MACHINE_ARCH that encodes ABI and endian information. Please see the following table for which to select. For 32-bit MIPS platforms (or to run a 32-bit kernel on a 64-bit CPU) use mipsel or mips, while 64-bit MIPS platforms will use mips64el or mips64. The 'el' variety is used for machines with little endian byte order, while big endian byte order is implicit otherwise.

• Byte	ABI
  Order	o32	n32	n64
  Little	mipsel	mipsn32el	mips64el
  Big	mips	mipsn32	mips64

You will set TARGET to 'mips' below and TARGET_ARCH to the entry from the table above.

Here are a few examples of TARGET_ARCH:

• System	TARGET_ARCH	System endianness and ABI
  MALTA (gxemul)	mipsel	o32 little endian
  rt305x	mipsel	o32 little endian
  AR71xx/AR93xx	mips	o32 big endian
  Octeon/ERL	mips64	n64 big endian

Choose the kernel you want to build and then use something like this script (the omissions are for size or speed of build reasons only):

setenv SRCROOT /home/gonzo/FreeBSD/svn/mips
setenv TARGET mips
setenv TARGET_ARCH mipsel
# not used:
# setenv TARGET_CPUTYPE mips32
setenv KERNCONF MALTA
setenv MAKEOBJDIRPREFIX /home/gonzo/FreeBSD/obj/mips
set NFSROOT=/home/gonzo/FreeBSD/nfsroot
set TFTPBOOT=/tftpboot

# Select some subset: the following used to be good, but now isn't
# set MAKEFLAGS=(-DWITHOUT_CDDL           \
#                -DWITHOUT_GAMES         \
#                -DWITHOUT_DOCS          \
#                -DWITHOUT_ACPI          \
#                -DWITHOUT_KERBEROS      \
#                -DWITHOUT_RESCUE        \
#                -DWITHOUT_MAN           \
#                -DWITHOUT_PROFILE       \
#                -DWITHOUT_BSNMP         \
#                -DWITHOUT_NIS           \
#                -DWITHOUT_IPX           \
#                -DWITHOUT_ATM)

cd ${SRCROOT}
make ${MAKEFLAGS} kernel-toolchain
make ${MAKEFLAGS} buildkernel
make ${MAKEFLAGS} DESTDIR=${TFTPBOOT} installkernel
make ${MAKEFLAGS} buildworld

sudo -E make DESTDIR=${NFSROOT} ${MAKEFLAGS} installworld
sudo -E make DESTDIR=${NFSROOT} ${MAKEFLAGS} distribution

Boot

There is no ready-for-use firmware yet so you'll need either netboot your board and mount root over NFS. Or build disk image for emulator (like gxemul).

Netboot

• Setup isc-dhcpd and add entry for board (config courtesy of Andrew Thompson)

subnet 192.168.10.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
        deny unknown-clients;
        option routers 192.168.10.1;
        option root-path "192.168.10.196:/src/nfsroot";
        # tftp server address and kernel path
        next-server 192.168.10.196;
        filename "kernel";
}

host mips {
        hardware ethernet 00:15:6d:c1:28:2e;    # the mac address of the board
        fixed-address 192.168.10.x;             # pick an unused address
}

• Enable tftpd in inetd.conf, modify -s parameter to point to directory with MIPS kernels and restart inetd

tftp    dgram   udp     wait    root    /usr/libexec/tftpd      tftpd -l -s /src/FreeBSD/tftpboot

• Add $DESTDIR entry to /etc/exports

$DESTDIR -maproot=root -network 192.168.10/24

• Add root fs to $DESTDIR/etc/fstab

192.168.10.196:/src/nfsroot     /       nfs     rw      0       0

• Enable mountd/nfsd (and optionally rpc.statd/rpc.lockd) in /etc/rc.conf and start them

rpcbind_enable="YES"
rpc_statd_enable="YES"
rpc_lockd_enable="YES"
nfs_server_enable="YES"
mountd_enable="YES"

GXEmul

• Add line for root fs to $DESTDIR/etc/fstab
• Build proper image using makefs tool (sysutils/makefs):

makefs mips.img $DESTDIR

• Boot gxemul (with GXEMUL kernel configuration):

gxemul -E oldtestmips -d i:/path/to/mips.img /path/to/kernel

• Boot gxemul (with Malta kernel configuration):

gxemul -e malta -d i:/path/to/mips.img -C 4Kc /path/to/kernel