What have we here? First boot attempt with FreeBSD 14.1 aarch64 on a Thinkpad T14s gen6, running a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processor.

A few next steps, update the BIOS and other firmware blobs, mess around with some dtb files, poke and prod, iterate as usual.

#FreeBSD #Thinkpad #Snapdragon #arm64 #kernel

Boot process screen with a kernel panic, showing sequence and debug details from FreeBSD 14.1 on an arm64 laptop, Thinkpad T14s Gen6

  • Billy@fosstodon.org
    1·
    2 months ago

    @winterschon@bsd.cafe that’s exciting! How difficult was it? I’ve been eyeing these snapdragon PCs but not about to use windows as my daily driver so I’ve held off

    • 💞 eva 💞@mastodon.bsd.cafeOP
      1·
      2 months ago

      @billy@fosstodon.org yep, anything involving windows is a detriment. I did have some amount of foresight to swap the stock nvme (ships with win11) for a clean one, which turned out to be important as there are some Qualcomm firmware upgrades which (presently, hopefully not for forever) require exe … so the stock drive will be reinstalled temporarily.

      • Billy@fosstodon.org
        1·
        2 months ago

        @winterschon@bsd.cafe ah good thinking! I’ll keep an eye on your progress! I thought I read somewhere that Qualcomm was working to mainline drivers in Linux, or at the very least @tuxedocomputers@linuxrocks.online are working on a Linux laptop using Qualcomm’s chips1. Maybe there will be some work there you can reference for BSD as well!

    • 💞 eva 💞@mastodon.bsd.cafeOP
      1·
      2 months ago

      @lovisix@social.zdx.fr yep, that’s a fun mod! ooh the X280 was a great laptop, and is still a great laptop! somewhere around here is a X260 waiting for a panel upgrade, will give your tutorial a shot before disassembly occurs. 👍🏻

    • 💞 eva 💞@mastodon.bsd.cafeOP
      1·
      2 months ago

      @jchillerup@social.data.coop @pmdj@mstdn.social good question! still looking for a PCB schematic, though getting to a full boot command line would offer a step towards running hardware topo system calls necessary for enumeration.

      for better or worse, the text screams by until the panic stops, so I’ll be connecting its HDMI out to a PiKVM, which will facilitate streaming log capture; improving access to all that debugging data. typically my workflow for arm64 + freebsd involves either using a SoL terminal and/or RS232 / TTL output capture, but those are not available for a laptop… hmmm hmm.