Showstoppers for RPI3

[Paul Mather]

On Feb 26, 2020, at 4:17 PM, Karl Denninger <karl at denninger.net> wrote:

> 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 thought given Ian's pretty frank appraisal of the "love" (or otherwise)  
of the RPi platform amongst FreeBSD developers, it was a reasonable  
conclusion on my part. :-)  But, we can agree to disagree.

I apologise if the last paragraph of my original post seemed overly  
despondent.


> 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 agree with the above, and, over the long term, I've had great success  
with FreeBSD/arm and (to a lesser extent) FreeBSD/arm64 on various RPis.   
Lately, however, not so much---at least in the case of FreeBSD/arm64 on an  
RPi 3.  I'm using this as a local backup target for Arqbackup via SSH.  As  
of the last month(-ish), the system will go off into la-la land after a few  
days uptime such that it is only reachable via serial console.  IIRC, the  
USB subsystem is complaining about missing/losing interrupts.  (The error  
just keeps scrolling repetitively on the console.)  I'm wondering if the  
I/O load from the external backup hard drive is precipitating this?  For  
the record, it worked smoothly for many many months prior to that.  I'm  
using 12-STABLE (r358260 currently).


> 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?


I'm in the same boat.  I'm using RPi probably because the huge "mindshare"  
caused me to buy them.  There seem to be a lot of similar "hobbyist"  
devices out there, but the choice is overwhelming to me (hence my asking  
for specific hints).

Cheers,

Paul.