ARM: Cubieboard (A10) / Cubieboard 2 (A20) support

[dsjonny]

It would be fine if there would be a Cubieboard compatible version of the Haiku's ARM port.

Cubieboard A20 is an ARM based mini SoC system. It has an Allwinner A20 CPU with 2 cores, 1 GiB RAM, build-in 4 GiB NAND chip, SATA, Mali VGA with HDMI output, ethernet, USB 2.0 and ALSA sound.

Some URLs: ​http://docs.cubieboard.org/products/start#cubieboard2 ​http://docs.cubieboard.org/resources ​http://dl.cubieboard.org/software/a20-cubieboard/

Actually it runs some Linux distributions but I think Haiku would be better and much more usable.

I have attached all the details what I found on the running system using Fedora 20 (I don't know what is useful in this case).

[pulkomandy]

More useful would be:

• Hardware schematics
• Programming manual of the chips used (Allwinner A20 itself and any support chips for bluetooth, sound, etc.)
• Donating/lending one such board to Haiku developers to make this happen.

Unfortunately providing manuals is not where Allwinner is shining.

I have some Allwinner A10 based hardware I plan to play with, but didn't have time to dig into this yet.

[dsjonny]

You can find some technical documents here:

​http://dl.cubieboard.org/docs/EN/ ​http://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page ​http://linux-sunxi.org/Sunxi_disp_driver_interface ​http://dl.cubieforums.com/pdf/ ​http://linux-sunxi.org/Category:Register_guide

Unfortunatelly I have only one of the Cubieboard 2, but maybe I can provide this for Haiku to help the ARM port.

[ithamar]

All Allwinner hardware I've encountered so far (and that's quite a bit) is all using U-Boot, so that helps a little too. Also, they did a proper GPL release and there are reference manuals around. I agree this would be an interesting target too. At the moment though, I think we should get the ARM build stable again, before adding more targets. Once I get a chance to start DeviceTree support, it will become much cleaner to add targets (I hope to do that in the BeGeistert coding sprint).

[danboid]

I'd love to be able run run Haiku on the BananaPi / Cubieboard etc. They seem like a perfect match.

[haiqu]

Basic cubieboard is supported. The problem is lack of the Allwinner A20 CPU support. The Cubie4 uses the A80.

If it isn't supported in the qemu-linaro fork it probably won't get done.

[pulkomandy]

Basic cubieboard has some support in qemu, but I could not get it to run u-boot IIRC. I don't know if the support is low level enough or if they can only start a linux kernel.

The qemu-linaro fork is used only because it has the beagle-xm support, for other boards we will use whatever has the support (mainstream qemu or yet another fork).

[pulkomandy]

Looking into some Allwinner A10 based hardware I have here. We'll see how far I can get it.

[danboid]

That's good news! If you get Haiku running on your A10 thee's a very good chance the same binaries will run on my BananaPi.

Won't X512's RISCV porting extravaganza have helped progress the ARM builds along somehow? I'd presume so.

An even better Allwinner target for Haiku would be the T95 MAX and H10 Play TV boxes which use the AW H6 chipset. They're dirt cheap and offer more than RPi's do for the money whilst including a case, cables and 32+ GB of onboard emmc. The H10 Play has 4 USB ports. They only have 100 Mb onboard ethernet tho.

[pulkomandy]

Won't X512's RISCV porting extravaganza have helped progress the ARM builds along somehow? I'd presume so.

Yes, to some extent, but mainly it's David Karoly's work on the ARM port that helped quite a lot.

Today's status update: the EFI bootloader is running fine. There were no drivers for the UART (although it looks like an existing one can be reused) and for the interrupt controller (trying to write one now). That should get me a bit further in the boot process, I hope.

[pulkomandy]

First run of patches:

​https://review.haiku-os.org/c/haiku/+/5104