====== FreeBSD on the Ubiquiti Routerstation Pro ======

===== Webpages =====

  * http://www.ubnt.com/rspro
  * https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/ubiquiti/routerstation.pro

===== Hardware =====

  * AR7161 - 680MHz
  * 128MB SDRAM
  * 16MB serial flash
  * RTC
  * 1 x USB 2.0 socket
  * 1 x SD card slot
  * 7 x GPIO
  * RS232
  * JTAG
  * Atheros AR8316 Gigabit switch PHY
  * 3 + 1 1000baseTX ports, via AR8316 PHY
  * 3 x %%MiniPCI%% slots

===== Datasheets =====

  * Flash datasheet: http://www1.futureelectronics.com/doc/MACRONIX/MX25L12845EZNI-10G.pdf 

===== Stuff that's weird/broken =====

  * %%RedBoot%% caches the flags passed to exec -c. I'm not sure where it does this currently.
  * The RTC support is there but not yet functioning. It is on the SPI bus; the device datasheet is here - http://www.nxp.com/acrobat_download/datasheets/PCF2123_1.pdf The problem is that it shares the CS line with flash and thus requires some hackery in order to correctly function.
  * The USB code in -head needs some alignment fixes to work properly. A symptom is "%%AutoSense%% failed" when trying to probe the on-board SD slot which is a USB mass device. Kan has written a patch - http://people.freebsd.org/~kan/usb_rspro.diff .
  * The SD slot can't easily be used as a root device - it doesn't probe successfully until -after- single user mode startup begins.
  * Reading/writing data from /dev/redboot/XXX character devices must be done using an alignment and blocksize of 64k. It is slow and ties up the kernel!

===== Device/Platform Weirdnesses =====

  * [[[AdrianChadd/AtherosStuff|AdrianChadd/AtherosStuff]]]

===== Playing with MDROOT =====

  * I'm using FFS version 1 and "makefs" to build an MDROOT. Note that the endian-ness needs to be forced to match the MIPS endian-ness (I'm using big endian) and the kernel vfs mount output when this is incorrect is very unhelpful.

===== Flash images =====

  * %%OpenWRT%% has some code from Ubquity which builds the images:
    * https://dev.openwrt.org/browser/trunk/tools/firmware-utils/src/fw.h
    * https://dev.openwrt.org/browser/trunk/tools/firmware-utils/src/mkfwimage.c
    * https://dev.openwrt.org/browser/trunk/target/linux/ar71xx/image/Makefile#L242
  * The above tool needs to be modified to generate different load and entry points - the Linux images use the same load/entry points but %%FreeBSD%%'s elf image doesn't
  * The version string must start with RSPRO or the %%RedBoot%% loader will refuse to run it!
  * The %%RedBoot%% loader understands GZIP - so the kernel image can simply be gzip -9'ed to fit in the available space. The %%RedBoot%% loader will ungzip it into memory for you before executing.
  * %%RedBoot%% will refuse to write a kernel image that isn't a multiple of 64k (flash sector size?) Thus the kernel image must be padded before being fed to the firmware image program.
  * The image generated by the above program will overwrite the non-system FIS partitions - so it's in effect a "fresh"  start. It also avoids having to manually fiddle with fis commands at the %%RedBoot%% prompt and potentially bricking the unit.

===== Building Software =====

  * I'm building binary packages on the units themselves via an NFS root. That works fine - the ports system however needs a bit of hand holding to tell it to use the right endian-ness. Add TARGET_BIG_ENDIAN=true to /etc/make.conf before building any ports.

===== Stuff that's been fixed =====

  * PCI didn't work unless you boot verbose. You can do this by passing a -v flag to the kernel by using the -c flag to exec. Ie, exec -c "-v". gonzo fixed this in -HEAD by adding a longer delay into the PCI bus probing logic