So. What next? FreeBSD is installed and running on my unmatched. Simply put: Self Hosting.
The HiFive unmatched is the first “modern” system to be ever-so-almost completely open source. You can, if you like, get yourself a 68040, a pile of ram and NetBSD. The system will be abominably slow compared to modern systems, but you will be able to achieve 100% open source. There are even FPGA based video solutions.
In my last article I detailed cross-compiling and installing FreeBSD for the unmatched. To make the system 100% self hosted, you need to “portsnap fetch” followed by “portsnap extract” … and then “cd /usr/ports/devel/git” and “make install” … you need this because you want the sources. This will install a few things to get git up and running… but you will download and compile each from source … automatically with just “make install” and answering a few dialogue questions. You can say “BATCH=yes make install” to not get any of the questions.
After that is done, “cd /usr/src; git clone GitHub - jrtc27/freebsd-src at unmatched” … in the future you can get the freebsd git tree (once these patches are installed) … but for now, you need the new stuff. “make -j8 buildworld” followed by “make -j8 buildkernel” followed by “make installkernel” and “make installworld” … and “reboot” and you’re done!