Any good alternative to Raspberry for Arm64?

[Dan Kotowski]

> > > of course , starting @~$500-$700(without accessories like RAM etc.)
> > >
> > > you can buy aarch64-dev-boards which completely outperform the RPI4
> > >
> > > in performance and connectivity ;-)
> >
> > But isn't there a big risk that those exotic powerful boards might not
> >
> > work or not work well with FreeBSD, since few developers have them, and
> >
> > no one considers them important enoug to make sure releases work on them?
>
> e.g. you can ask 'the unrelenting myfreeweb-man‘ :-) & the board-owner Dan K. (added to CC) for the „what works, what doesn’t“- status of the LX2K …
>
> while I would call it less a risk then more a challenge to work with boards like that(that’s why you would buy one).
>
> well… so many topics in one thread.. funny...see you later...
>
> Regards
>
> K.

SolidRun's Honeycomb (HC), built around NXP's LX2K SoC, is pretty phenomenal. Firmware still has a few changes in the works, but it's mostly cosmetic stuff at this point and I've been happily daily-driving mine for about a month - yes, it sufficiently replaced my aging desktop built around a Core i7-3770K! In fact, there's a handful of us using HCs as FreeBSD-13.0 desktops now.

However:
* no built-in GPU, so if you want a desktop you'll need to get one of those and that'll eat up your x8 slot
* no onboard NIC drivers because they're connected via DPAA2 which we don't have any support for and I just don't have the time or expertise to write those myself :