@pulkomandy IIRC I looked into adding FDT support to the FreeBSD compat layer and it didn't look too difficult. Let me know if that's what's needed and I can point you in the right direction at a minimum
@waddlesplash if FreeBSD has a driver for the Allwinner EMAC ethernet, then yes, that's one way to do it.
@waddlesplash NetBSD driver: https://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/sys/arch/arm/sunxi/sunxi_emac.c?rev=1.37;content-type=text%2Fplain
FreeBSD has https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/9d50245a0f1333e10cc1c4dda16878cd79a7c42b/sys/arm/allwinner/if_awg.c#L152 but not enabled for this specific chip (sun8i-v3s-emac is not in the compatible list) so I'm not sure it would work
u-boot driver (confirmed working by me): https://elixir.bootlin.com/u-boot/v2026.10/source/drivers/net/sun8i_emac.c
@waddlesplash The U-Boot one is very simplified (no DMA, etc) so I think for now I may do a quick and dirty driver based on that (U-Boot already sets up the device so I really just need the send and receive functions).
I think trying to do a full-blown driver at this point without having the OS running isn't going to go well, most likely. I want to do ethernet first (and network booting) because I can make it really simple.