FreeBSD for the Xbox

July 26th, 2005, 21:31 Posted By: wraggster

Over the last 2 weeks, I have been working on a port of FreeBSD for the Xbox. During this effort, Ed Schouten has given me assistance by reviewing patches and giving advice.

The port is fully functional. The framebuffer is fully supported, same goes for sound and USB devices (such as an USB keyboard for the console). Only ethernet is missing, currently, as the binary only driver in /usr/ports/net/nvnet fails with an error 5, for some reason. Assistance there would be very welcome.

I have made patches for FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE and FreeBSD 6.0-BETA1. Currently, the port requires the Linux Cromwell(info) BIOS (which was patched so it would understand FreeBSD kernel ELF files). More information on the patch can be found in the mail archives of xbox-linux. You will need the latest CVS version for it to work, or 2.40 + patches (patches can be found at the URL above)

Also, a live CD has been created, which has 4 kernels: a 5.4-RELEASE and 6.0-BETA1 patched kernel with /dev/acd0 and /dev/ad0s1a root devices, a patched Cromwell BIOS (which you can load from a normal Cromwell BIOS), as well as the base installation files and kernel patches; as the framebuffer driver isn't ready enough yet to provide proper ANSI support, installation should be done manually.

The project's results (including patches, todo items etc) can be found at http://nexus.il.fontys.nl/ and http://freebsd.ilse.nl/xbox/. The patches are available there, including a BitTorrent file of the LiveCD (which is about 200MB).

As the patches are so minimal (about 1000 lines, including sample kernel config), I hope they will be considered for 6.x-RELEASE or HEAD, as they can easily be integrated on a i386 CD without hurting anything. I would be happy to help with this effort.
http://freebsd.ilse.nl/xbox/

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