Systems & embedded · FreeBSD
SoC bring-up, kernel and driver work, and ports maintenance — developed in the open, tested on the hardware in front of me, and submitted upstream.
01 — About
I work where the operating system meets the silicon: getting FreeBSD to boot on hardware that has only ever run vendor Linux, writing the drivers that make its peripherals usable, and keeping the ports tree building across architectures.
Most of what I do starts with a board on the desk, a serial cable, and no working device tree. From there it's clocks, pinctrl, MMC, USB and Ethernet until there's a login prompt — then the same work again, cleaned up, for upstream. I run SoCBSD so that effort doesn't die on one person's branch, and I maintain FreeBSD ports so there is software to install once a board boots.
Open to collaboration on driver work, board bring-up and ports maintenance — including contract and long-term maintenance work.
02 — Projects
Three tracks that feed each other: a fork where board support is grown, the ports tree that makes the result usable, and the upstream trees where it lands.
A FreeBSD fork dedicated to SoC board bring-up — a playground, not a distro. Far more SoC boards run vendor Linux than run FreeBSD. SoCBSD is a place to work on that: bring a board up, stabilise it, then submit the work upstream.
New ports, build-failure fixes, dependency bumps and cross-architecture cleanups for the FreeBSD ports tree — from dev tooling to multimedia and system utilities.
My working tree against FreeBSD main: per-board support branches for
MediaTek and Rockchip platforms, plus standalone fixes such as the Bluetooth stack patch.
Each branch is self-contained — one board, built against FreeBSD main.
03 — Hardware
Three of these are on my desk — I build and boot them myself. The two Raspberry Pi cards are open SoCBSD arenas, waiting for someone who has the board in hand. Every card links to the branch where that work happens; all of them are still in bring-up.
MediaTek MT7622 · arm64
Router-class board: dual Cortex-A53, built-in switch and Wi-Fi silicon.
max-support-mediatek-7622-bananapir64
Rockchip RK3568 · arm64
Quad Cortex-A55 router board. Also an open arena in SoCBSD.
max-support-bananapi-r2-pro
MediaTek MT7623 · armv7
The 32-bit original of the R-series — armv7 rather than arm64.
max-support-bananapi-bpi-r2-7623
Broadcom BCM2837 · arm64
A SoCBSD arena — open for contributors who have the board in hand.
arena/raspberry-pi-3
Broadcom BCM2712 · arm64
A SoCBSD arena — the newest Pi silicon, and the one with the most left to do.
arena/raspberry-pi-5
Missing a board? Open an arena — that's exactly what SoCBSD is for.
04 — Upstream
The fork is a staging area, not a destination. Board support starts on a branch, stabilises in a SoCBSD arena, goes through review, and is submitted to the FreeBSD trees and wiki pages.
A per-board branch in Martinfx/freebsd-src, built and booted on real hardware.
Promoted into a SoCBSD arena so other owners of the same board can contribute.
Automated checks and human review on Phabricator and GitHub — clean provenance, real names, boot logs.
Submitted to freebsd-src or the ports tree, with the wiki board page updated to match.
05 — How SoCBSD works
Work happens in seasonal games: boards are the arenas, contributors are the players. The rules exist so that everything merged can survive the trip upstream.
Scope is SoC board support. Not a distro, not a desktop, not a rewrite of FreeBSD.
You must physically have the device. Support is written against boards, not datasheets.
Untested code is not merged. A claim about hardware needs a boot log behind it.
No copying GPL code. Everything must be relicensable and safe to send upstream.
Upstream FreeBSD wants attributable authorship, so the fork asks for it from day one.
Automated and AI-assisted review runs on every change, then a human signs it off.
06 — FAQ
The questions that come up most often by e-mail and in the FreeBSD forums.
Not out of the box — there is no BPI-R64 image on the FreeBSD download page. Support for its
MediaTek MT7622 SoC is what the
max-support-mediatek-7622-bananapir64
branch adds: device tree, clocks, pinctrl and the drivers needed to reach a console.
Build that branch for TARGET=arm64 and you get a bootable system on the board.
Three on my own bench: Banana Pi BPI-R64 (MediaTek MT7622, arm64), BPI-R2 Pro (Rockchip RK3568, arm64) and BPI-R2 (MediaTek MT7623, armv7). Two more are open SoCBSD arenas waiting for a contributor with the board: Raspberry Pi 3 (BCM2837) and Raspberry Pi 5 (BCM2712). Each has its own branch — see Boards and open arenas.
SoCBSD is a FreeBSD fork with exactly one job: SoC board bring-up. It is a playground, not a distribution — no installer, no desktop, no divergent userland. Work lands there first because merging is fast, then goes upstream into FreeBSD once it is stable. Everything is written to be relicensable and upstream-ready from the first commit.
Clone the tree, check out the branch for your board, then cross-build world and kernel:
git clone https://github.com/SoCBSD/socbsd-src.git
cd socbsd-src
git checkout arena/raspberry-pi-3
make -j$(sysctl -n hw.ncpu) buildworld buildkernel \
TARGET=arm64 TARGET_ARCH=aarch64Then write the result to an SD card, attach a serial console and capture the boot log — that log is what a pull request needs.
Yes — that is the whole point. Open an arena for your board or join an existing one. The rules are short: you must physically own the hardware, you must verify what you claim (untested code is not merged), no GPL code may be copied in, and you commit under a real name so the work can go upstream. See how SoCBSD works.
Upstream is the destination, not a side effect. A change starts on a per-board branch,
stabilises in a SoCBSD arena, goes through review on Phabricator and GitHub, and is
submitted to freebsd-src or the ports tree. Ports work takes the same route;
my ports repository holds over 560 commits of new ports, build-failure fixes and
cross-architecture cleanups.
Yes — board bring-up, device drivers, device trees, ports maintenance and long-term support contracts around FreeBSD on embedded hardware. Platforms I work on day to day are MediaTek, Rockchip and Broadcom. Write to freebsd@sysctl.cz or reach me on GitHub.
07 — Collaborate
I'm open to collaboration on driver work, board bring-up, ports maintenance and anything low-level around FreeBSD on embedded hardware. Contract work and long-term maintenance included.
Take an open board, or propose a new one you own.
Clone the tree, cut a branch, get to a console.
Boot log attached — that is what makes the change reviewable.
Once it is stable, it is submitted to FreeBSD.