Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2021 22:23:30 +0100 From: Denis Ovsienko <denis@ovsienko.info> To: freebsd-arm@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Any good alternative to Raspberry for Arm64? Message-ID: <20210328222330.26dd034c@basepc> In-Reply-To: <D11EA82A-8739-4BE6-8910-8D0952180661@kronometrix.org> References: <7b284f7718556f1cf0a7a205c98db6b1@pyret.net> <8F8F3491-3E1F-45C8-BF61-09F7557F48A5@googlemail.com> <4F30ABFD-66D2-4515-A3BB-F13F767F8FB9@kronometrix.org> <20210328212009.1b6b3ad98f26256a3490b063@bidouilliste.com> <D11EA82A-8739-4BE6-8910-8D0952180661@kronometrix.org>
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> I meant, does NetBSD has a better support for BLE, Wifi on ARM64 SBC
> than FreeBSD? More ready images available for different SBCs?
Ironically, the latest NetBSD release does not support RPI4B (RPI3 is
acceptable). Also ironically, the latest OpenBSD release supports RPI4B,
so long as you are happy to supply a separate UEFI bootloader, to run
the installer through the TTL console and to keep the root filesystem on
USB storage instead of the SD card.
I had looked into the other BSDs' ARM mailing lists not long ago, and my
impression was that RPI4B progress there is going through a similar
churn (this revision of this DT file plus this revision of this
bootloader fix this thing on this Pi model, but break that thing on
another model, and the other way around the next week).
Fortunately, my use case is a headless setup and requires only the wired
Ethernet connection, so I managed to get Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD and
OpenBSD on AArch64 using a set of RPIs. If your use case depends on
other hardware (USB, GPIO, GPU, wireless etc.), flipping between
operating systems will likely trade one surprises for others, but will
not take RPI4B away from the bleeding edge immediately and completely.
RPI3 seems to be old enough to be supported everywhere, but it is
notably slower. Other SBCs may be better supported, but I don't have
this information.
One thing I find useful about FreeBSD on RPI4B is that it seems to work
2-3 times faster than Linux and OpenBSD given the same workload, which
is C compilation with ccache on tmpfs. The difference is mainly due to a
very fast Autoconf stage on FreeBSD, the main C compiler performance is
actually a tiny bit lower.
--
Denis Ovsienko
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