BSDCan2014 - Final

BSDCan 2014
The Technical BSD Conference

Speakers
Paul Irofti
Schedule
Day Talks - Day 1 - Fri May 16 - 2014-05-16
Room Montpetit 201
Start time 11:30
Duration 01:00
Info
ID 480
Event type Lecture
Track Embedded
Language used for presentation English

Porting OpenBSD on the MIPS64-based Octeon Platforms

My work on the Octeon port made possible for OpenBSD to run on the D-Link DSR line of mid-range routers and also improved all supported models through the drivers I wrote for the hardware random number generator and the real-time clock. I'm continuing my work on improving the OpenBSD experience on the DSR products by adding support for the CF card in particular and the USB stack in general. This presentation summarizes the developments I brought and the obstacles I faced.

OpenBSD/octeon began in 2010 with an SDK created by IIJ and donated to OpenBSD. Portwell CAM-0100 becoming self-hosting in April 2013. Support for EdgeRouter LITE Ethernet was added in September 2013, allowing the EdgeRouter LITE to be usable by NFS booting.

Somewhere around mid-2013 someone kindly donated me an unsupported Octeon-based DSR-500 from D-Link. By October 2013 the machine was usable through NFS boot. Since then I started improving the port by adding new drivers like octrng(4) and octrtc(4), working on supporting the CF card found on the DSR models and towards adding generic USB support.

Lack of proper hardware documentation and a crippled SDK license are slowing down the porting process and don't allow for the creation of sound and robust device drivers.