Bodgit & Scarper

The release of OpenBSD 5.7 brings the latest batch of improvements I made for Soekris net6501 users.

The first change adds platform detection that should in fact work on all Soekris boards, (I think this change actually went in circa 5.4 but I never posted about it). Normally this information comes via the SMBIOS extensions but Soekris boards have a much stripped-down BIOS that lacks any of this support. There are however some vendor and product strings embedded in the BIOS image (probably used for printing on the serial console at POST) so they get picked out and used. For example:

# sysctl hw.vendor hw.product
hw.vendor=Soekris Engineering
hw.product=net6501

The second change adds the skgpio(4) driver which provides access to the GPIO & LEDs on the net6501. Two GPIO devices are provided; gpio0 for the 16 real GPIO pins, (JP8 in the net6501 manual); and gpio1 for the error and ready LEDs coerced into the GPIO framework as output-only pins. Here is what is displayed in dmesg at boot:

skgpio0 at isa0 port 0x680/32                                                  
gpio0 at skgpio0: 16 pins                                                      
gpio1 at skgpio0: 2 pins

You still need to configure the GPIO pins prior to raising the securelevel so add the following to /etc/rc.securelevel as a minimum:

gpioctl -q gpio1 0 set out error_led
gpioctl -q gpio1 1 set out ready_led

Now once the system is booted you can toggle the error LED with the following:

# gpioctl gpio1 error_led 2
pin error_led: state 0 -> 1
# gpioctl gpio1 error_led 2
pin error_led: state 1 -> 0

Tags: BIOS, GPIO, net6501, Soekris

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 30th, 2015 at 11:31 am and is filed under OpenBSD. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.