I am surprised that NetBSD still doesn't support the Pi 4 - given NetBSD's reput...

spijdar · on Dec 4, 2020

I don't have an rpi4 to test, but NetBSD should run fine on them.

Now you can just use generic Aarch64 UEFI images, since the pi 4 has a standards compliant UEFI/ACPI stack aka is "ServerReady"[0], and NetBSD 9 and above supports this machine type [1].

Edit: And for the wifi (and bluetooth) chipset, the gist is "it's a weird proprietary Broadcom chipset behind a somewhat unusual bus (SDIO)". FreeBSD has recently gained nominal support for the bus, eventually a wifi driver will be ported. Another place I've seen a SDIO wifi chipset used like this is the Wii. https://wiki.freebsd.org/SDIO

[0] https://rpi4-uefi.dev/about/

[1] https://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-9/NetBSD-9.0.html

opless · on Dec 4, 2020

SDIO used to be quite common.

Back when PDAs didn't have WiFi as standard, SDIO was the only way to fit them.

In fact, if I recall correctly my GPD Pocket doodah has SDIO wifi.

The bus isn't unusual, at all.

As for weird broadcom stuff ... I'll give you that, as you're absolutely correct there ;)

LeoPanthera · on Dec 4, 2020

Lots of people criticizing me for being wrong, but the Raspberry Pi NetBSD page:

https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/evbarm/raspberry_pi/

(the first result for Googling "netbsd raspberry pi")

says "All board variants earlier than the RPI4 are believed supported, and specific boards known to work are listed."

So if that's wrong... great. But that's what it says.

pmarin · on Dec 5, 2020

RPI4 support is in current (the future NetBSD 10), not in the last official realease.

johnklos · on Dec 4, 2020

The Raspberry Pi 4 has been supported for quite a while. I have a colocated Pi 4 running NetBSD happily. On earlier Pis, Wifi works fine, BTW. I haven't tried bluetooth.

Perhaps the problem is that you forgot to read about it before you posted?