
FreeBSD/ARM on Raspberry Pi - sasvari
https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/arm/Raspberry%20Pi
======
adventureloop
I wish the FreeBSD hardware pages gave a description of what is supported. The
OpenBSD hardware pages really do stand out in this regard.

Compare OpenBSD's BeagleBone[1] Black vs FreeBSD's BeagleBone Black[2]

From the OpenBSD page I can see at a glance that the Ethernet is supported,
but USB is not available. I would like to port FreeBSD's USB implementation
across if it works, but how do I know if it is worth pursuing without doing an
install.

[1][http://www.openbsd.org/armv7.html](http://www.openbsd.org/armv7.html)

[2][https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/arm/BeagleBoneBlack](https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/arm/BeagleBoneBlack)

~~~
josh64
That being said, I don’t think we are going to get OpenBSD on the rpi any time
soon.

[http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-
misc&m=132788027403910&w=2](http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-
misc&m=132788027403910&w=2)

~~~
adventureloop
It is a real shame, but OpenBSD as a project care a lot about having free
access to all the available code[1]. It makes a lot of sense to me to want
access to all of the code for something as core as the boot process.

Of course the project saying they won't support the hardware doesn't mean you
cannot start the port yourself. That is how ports to palm devices came
about[2]

[1][http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#39](http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#39)

[2][http://www.openbsd.org/palm.html](http://www.openbsd.org/palm.html)

~~~
josh64
That’s true, especially with FreeBSD and NetBSD both having ports.

------
skreuzer
If you are interested in creating a FreeBSD image for the Raspberry Pi, take a
look at crochet [1] which is a script that pretty much automates the steps
outlined in the wiki. In addition, it can also be used to create images for
Beaglebone and other ARM (and MIPS I believe) platforms

[1] [https://github.com/kientzle/crochet-
freebsd](https://github.com/kientzle/crochet-freebsd)

------
salient
It's amazing how many "full operating systems" want to support something as
weak as Raspberry Pi, and how many things can be done with it. I can't wait
for Raspberry Pi to come to a more powerful architecture like ARMv8 (at
relatively the same price-point) and see what comes out of that.

~~~
simias
Raspberry Pi is weak only by very modern standards, Linux and the BSDs were
first implemented on much weaker hardware. And NetBSD famously runs on a
toaster.

The embedded world has seen a massive performance boost in the last decade,
the raspberry pi would've looked like a supercomputer in the 90s...

My point is that while the raspberry is not very powerful by today's standards
it still has all the features of a modern "desktop" system: an MMU, SIMD, USB,
graphic acceleration to cite a few. The line between embedded and desktop
architectures is getting blurrier by the year.

~~~
Narishma
I agree with your general point, but while the Raspberry Pi has some SIMD
instructions, they are pretty useless in practice. They are integer-only, only
work on 32-bit registers (so you can only work on two 16-bit or four 8-bit
values) and they are implemented serially on one lane (each clock, the CPU
does the work on one of the values) instead of the parallel way SIMD is
generally done.

~~~
simias
Actually I was thinking about ARM NEON, I thought the broadcom SoC in the pi
supported it but I was mistaken.

So yeah, you can scratch the SIMD part of my original comment.

------
galaktor
I run Arch Linux for ARM on my Pis (headless via WiFi and ssh). What benefit
might I get from using FreeBSD? I'm genuinely curious as I'm not very familiar
with BSD/Unix (although I am comfortable with Linux)

------
jtth
Neat, but I don't understand why? No one's compiling binaries for it, it's
already slow, etc. What's the reason why anyone who was interested in _using_
an RPi would want to use FreeBSD on it?

------
lifeisstillgood
Well thats my next project

~~~
josh64
Just beware that there are very few binary ports packages out there.

NetBSD CURRENT also supports rpi, but it too has the problem of very few
pkgsrc binary packages.

~~~
kapupetri2
Not so fast, here you have many fresh packages for NetBSD rpi
[http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/arm/6.0_201...](http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/arm/6.0_2013Q4/)

~~~
lifeisstillgood
I am halfway into migrating my build process over to pkgng (I got quite a
surprise when CvSup stopped working, I'm just old fashioned I guess), so I
might be happy to buy an extra RPi just to populate a pkg server for folks to
use.

At least I have a project goal now beyond just playing - thank you

