Showstoppers for RPI3

[Karl Denninger]

On 2/26/2020 3:41 PM, Paul Mather wrote:
> All fair enough.  I'm probably in the same boat as Bob Prohaska inasmuch as I have a couple of Raspberry Pi devices of varying vintages hanging around.  I'm a longtime FreeBSD user, so, naturally, I prefer to run FreeBSD on these devices, and have done so for a while (with varying degrees of success/stability).
>
> It sounds from the above I shouldn't bother, for pain and misery will attend me all my days as a result. :-)
>
> If Raspberry Pi is a crappy platform and a bad choice to use, FreeBSD-wise, what is the suggested alternative in the same low-power/low-price (and Raspberry Pi-like spec) arena?  Is it the Pine64 stuff like the PINE A64, ROCK64, and ROCKPro64??
>
> I'm willing to buy something other than Raspberry Pi (I have a BeagleBone Black, for example), but I don't want to buy something that is derided and despised by FreeBSD developers and avoided by them like the plague.  I am not an ARM/SoC or electronics expert, so I feel unqualified to know what is a "crappy ARM platform."
>
> Also, if the true situation with Raspberry Pi is that it is unlikely to see development within FreeBSD, it would be more honest to deprecate the platform officially on the FreeBSD site.  I'd even go so far as to suggest not to distribute official images for it, as that carries with it a hint of blessing and support.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Paul.

I'm not at all sure that's reasonably fair, to be frank.

I have Pis in both the "2" and "3" vintage running what I consider to be 
production (and important) code.  Other than the issues that ALL Arm 
platforms have (e.g. lldb doesn't work right, so have fun debugging 
things) I've had zero trouble with it.  In fact, I've got uptimes 
recorded in the many-months timeframe, only limited by when the power 
goes off and since I use them in a "NanoBSD" environment I don't much 
care if/when that happens, since the things they talk to go off when the 
power does too, and they've always come back up on their own.

Are they perfect or even "excellent" platforms?  Not really.  The I/O is 
a mess, but if you don't need more "oomph" in I/O capacity than they 
have it doesn't matter (e.g. they make poor routers or firewalls, simply 
because they don't have the necessary "oomph" through the network side 
of things.)

I'd be happy to move to something else too, provided it was something I 
can get at a reasonable cost and does the things I need (specifically, I 
need I2c and GPIO for the purposes I put these to.)  But... what is the 
"something" I should move to?

-- 
-- Karl Denninger
/The Market-Ticker/
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