Showstoppers for RPI3

[Bob Bishop]

Hi,

> On 26 Feb 2020, at 21:21, Ian Lepore <ian at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 2020-02-26 at 15:41 -0500, Paul Mather wrote:
>> On Feb 26, 2020, at 10:33 AM, Ian Lepore <ian at freebsd.org> wrote:
>> 
>>> On Wed, 2020-02-26 at 06:32 +0100, Klaus Küchemann via freebsd-arm
>>> wrote:
>>>> But that´s the absolute joke of the century :-) that these issues
>>>> last so long here on the mailing list 
>>> 
>>> The current freebsd-arm devs keep pointing out that nobody is
>>> especially interested in maintaining or working on rpi* stuff at
>>> all. 
>>> Why in the world would you be surprised that nobody is working on
>>> it?
>>> 
>>> If you want to run freebsd on arm hardware, try using hardware that
>>> people are actually working to support.  If you must use crappy rpi
>>> hardware, either run linux on it, or consider paying someone to do
>>> the
>>> freebsd support you need.  Complaining that nobody will work for
>>> free
>>> on hardware they hate working on is just...
>>> complaining.  Pointlessly.
>> 
>> 
>> 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.
> 
> It really is pretty specific to the rpi family, for a pair of reasons:
> 
> - The hardware is just crappy, buggy, limited, hard to work with.

Depends what you are trying to do with it. We are using FreeBSD on Pi zero in embedded systems, all the I/O is via GPIO and it’s easy to use and works just fine. It’s **WAY** cheaper than any comparable solution short of dealing directly with the SoC and we don’t have the volume for that.

> - Documentation needed to write device drivers is not openly
> available, and getting an NDA in place with broadcom never seems to
> happen despite people over the years saying they would work to make it
> happen.

That is admittedly a problem. 

> For inexpensive low-power boards... For the 32-bit world, the
> Allwinnner hardware is probably best supported, with imx6 a close
> second.  For 64-bit I'd say it's the rockpro stuff.
> 
> -- Ian

--
Bob Bishop
rb at gid.co.uk