FreeBSD- any progress?

Orion Series O6
1

I am considering purchase of the Orion O6.
What is holding me back is lack of information on software progress. I noticed back in January 2025 that some attempts to make FreeBSD run. Then silence.

On the FreeBSD arm email list in January:
https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-arm/2025-January/

There have been no further email posts or any indication of progress.
Is their some information about how FreeBSD is working on O6?

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2

I was able to install FreeBSD-CURRENT on a USB-SSD with ZFS root and run make buildworld.
PCIe is not working yet, but there is a patch.
https://reviews.freebsd.org/D49709
As soon as the patch is merged, I will build the environment on the NVMe SSD again.

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Hi Naoki,
can I ask what build or image were you using?

4

It’s where it should be
https://download.freebsd.org/snapshots/arm64/aarch64/ISO-IMAGES/15.0/

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@RadxaNaoki Thanks for the info! Am I right in thinking that the patch you linked to was replaced by this one which is still open?

Once that patch is in do you have a sense of what board features will be working in FreeBSD? AFAICT there’s some additional binary Linux firmware to get all the board up and running and I’m guessing that won’t be available for FreeBSD.

P.S. I just wanted to add that I’m incredibly grateful for all the community work Radxa does to test out your boards on other OSs – I know the FreeBSD community isn’t the biggest! :slight_smile:

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What about the OpenBSD support, did you try it and does PCI etc work

About FreeBSD support, O6 specific drivers been implemented, also does the O6 have a standardized boot environment which helps?

@DFeichtinger Welcome to the forum.

7

I’ve got FreeBSD up and running but CPU performance seems particularly slow.

My tests suggest the CPU freq is limited to 1 ghz.

@ RadxaNaoki for testing, I was wondering if there is a way to lock the CPU frequencies to maximum at uefi level?

8

Currently the FreeBSD ULE scheduler has no proper support for heterogeneous core configurations: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Scheduler/Hybrid

This not only affects this board (which probably uses DinamicIQ) but also older ARM big.LITTLE cores and even Intel Alder Lake e-cores.

9

As far as I know, FreeBSD cpufreq driver doesn’t support ACPI CPPC yet.
However, my testing with UEFI 1.0.0-3 (with CPPC disabled) indicates the CPU seems to run at max frequency.

Device Manager
 -> Platform Configuration
  -> Compliance Configuration
   -> Disable ACPI CPPC                [X]

Please make sure the configuration change is saved, as there is a bug in 1.0.0-3.)

For testing, please use cpuset(1) to set core affinity.

core   : freq
0 1    : 2.6GHz
2 3 4 5: 1.8GHz
6 7    : 2.3GHz
8 9    : 2.2GHz
10 11  : 2.5GHz

(I’m not talking about the process scheduler.)

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