Re: FreeBSD 14: Poll armv6 deprecated or removed

On Wed, Dec 14, 2022 at 8:50 AM Ed Maste <emaste@freebsd.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 13 Dec 2022 at 21:22, Julian H. Stacey <jhs@berklix.com> wrote:
> >
> > Extending wordings associated with each Pi dd image, would be very
> > welcome, to specificaly list all hardware version of a Pi each image
> > of v6, v7, aarch64, the image should boot.
> >
> > As a newbie to Raspberry Pi (but not FreeBSD) I have long been confused
> > which image is for which version of Pi hardware.
>
> The Raspberry Pi model naming convention is indeed confusing. The
> armv6 Raspberry Pis are those with the BCM2835 SoC. These are the
> original Raspberry Pi (A, B, A+, B+) and the Raspberry Pi Zero
> (including W variants, except 2 W). These are all the ones that would
> be desupported after FreeBSD 14 in Warner's proposal.
>

Yes. The original Raspberry models are hard to come by in volume these days,
at least relative to the later ones. Even the RPi 2's are hard to find,
relatively speaking.
Sure, you can find them in the after market and on ebay, but they haven't
shipped
in volume from Raspberry in years. The Zero and ZeroW are more available,
but have
always been poorly supported since we don't support any networking on them
that's
not a USB add-on device. There are a number of follow-on products from both
Raspberry and others that fit the niche of the original Zero and ZeroW.


> Raspberry Pi 2 uses armv7 images. You can use aarch64 images on 3, 4 and
> Zero 2.
>

The RPi 2 1.1 and earlier uses armv7 images, but the 1.2 and later can use
aarch64 images.
Modulo missing dtb files, you can also boot the armv7 images on later rpi
if you want / need to.
I've not tried it lately, but have done it accidentally a few times over
the years on the RPi 3's that
I often confused with my RPi 2's when I'm not paying close attention... I
don't think it's an officially
supported and tested configuration (though the best way to find out is to
make an absolute
statement like this in public).

Warner