Any good alternative to Raspberry for Arm64?

[Mark Millard]

On 2021-Mar-27, at 20:51, Carl Johnson <carlj at peak.org> wrote:

> Andrew Mitchell via freebsd-arm <freebsd-arm at freebsd.org> writes:
> 
>> Hi everyone,
>> I've seen that there are arm machines for FreeBSD other than
>> Raspberry. I've been using it with 14.0-CURRENT, and my skills are too
>> limited for patching it. So, I've decided to find a machine on which a
>> RELEASE or STABLE version would work. To my knowledge, and after many
>> tries, it seems that there are no FreeBSD working smoothly on RPI4 B.
>> So, if you have any suggestions for a working FreeBSD on any machine, I'd be grateful.
>> I won't discard 14.0 CURRENT, as I've done quite a few things which
>> were much fun. It's just for getting other experiences.
>> 
>> Please, tell me.
>> Andy
> 
> I have 13.0-RC3 working well on a RPi 4B with 8GB RAM.  The only problem
> I have is the efifb is working with very low resolution, and that would
> unusable for my desktop use.  It current reports "VT(efifb): resolution
> 592x448" on a 1280x1024 monitor, but I haven't figured out a way to use
> the full monitor resolution.  Raspbian does work properly, and my RPi 2B
> running FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE also works properly with the same monitor,
> but they don't use efifb.

If your RPi4B's config.txt has a line:

hdmi_safe=1

then try commenting it out with a # or
deleting it.

As I understand, the line is there by default
because some contexts end up with no display
at all without it (blind context). But otherwise
it ends up preventing the display size tracking,
so there is a tradeoff to having it by default.

Technically https://elinux.org/RPiconfig documents
hdmi_safe=1 as an abbreviated way of saying:

hdmi_force_hotplug=1
hdmi_ignore_edid=0xa5000080
config_hdmi_boost=4
hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=4
disable_overscan=0
overscan_left=24
overscan_right=24
overscan_top=24
overscan_bottom=24

so working based on part of the expanded
list might be an alternative in some
complicated context.

===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com
( dsl-only.net went
away in early 2018-Mar)