Recommended arm hardware (mostly for compilation)?

Philipp Klaus Krause pkk at spth.de
Thu May 14 13:34:57 UTC 2020


I'm considering to add a FreeBSD arm machine to the Small Device C
Compiler (SDCC) compile farm. The goal would be to have another arm
machine in the farm (for redundancy in case we need to drop the current
GNU/Linux arm machine, which ) and a FreeBSD machine (to allow us to
promote FreeBSD to an officially supported platform for SDCC). Its task
would be daily compilation of SDCC snapshots and running regression
tests (i.e. mostly compiling small test programs with SDCC and running
the binaries on emulators).

Can you recommend some hardware?

A RasPi 3B would probably a bit too weak (I have one and tried FreeBSD
12 on it; the 1GB RAM limit is an issue for this task - in particular it
makes parallel compilation impossible); there currently is some RasPi
running GNU/Linux in the farm and it barely keeps up with the load.

So I'm looking for something with sufficient RAM that is likely to be
well-supported by FreeBSD for some years.

So far, I've considered:

RasPi 4B - hardware seems ok, though FreeBSD support is apaprently
lacking due to lack of documentation (how does OpenBSD manage?), and
only 4 GB of RAM.

RockPro64 - hardware seems okay, though only 4 GB of RAM. I've read on
this list thaat the big/little cores aren't handled well by FreeBSD.

Pine H64 - small RAM (3GB), rather new.

MACCHIATObin - a bit on the expensive side, but still okay and has a RAM
slot.

Which of these is likely to work out-of-the-box in the FreeBSD 13
release? Any recommendations on which hardware to get?


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