BBS:      TELESC.NET.BR
Assunto:  Re: Bsd Based Os's
De:       bp
Data:     Fri, 23 Jan 2026 11:00:02 +1100
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Mike Scott  wrote:
> On 22/01/2026 15:10, bp@www.zefox.net wrote:
>> Tom Moore  wrote:
>>> Hi all,
>>> Anyone have any suggestions as to what BSD based os works well on the
>>> Raspberry Pi machines?
>>> I'm looking at either FreeBSD or NetBSD.
>>> Any ideas for one vs another?
>>> I have a Pi 3b device here to play with.
>> 
>> It really depends on what you expect to accomplish.
>> 
>> What do you want the machine to do?
>> 
>> The most troublesome aspect is limited RAM. If the loading is
>> light, it'll work fine. If you want the machine to self-host
>> some gyrations will be required. X with TWM will work, an X
>> desktop environment will be useless. I'm using Pi3s for name
>> service running bind9 from microSD. It seems to work acceptably.
> 
> The setup with pi4/freebsd worked reasonably well as a home server. Mine 
> provided nfs, mail, web (apache and mojolicious), ntp, dns and dhcp on 
> only 4Gb ram. The main issue was that nfs bulk writes were very slow.
> 
There's a vast difference between Pi3 and Pi4, chiefly memory. My FreeBSD
Pi4s use 8GB and self-host without swapping at all.

> The crunch came when I tried processing a lot of images within a 
> mojolicious web server. It simply could not do the job fast enough. I 
> suspect it was overheating and lowering the clock speed. The replacement 
> amd64 runs many times faster.

How does the power consumption compare?

Was the Pi4 cpu-bound, or memory-bound? Swap on USB3 might help,
especially if SSD. If it's thermal limiting a fan will help.  

>> 
>> I've a collection of notes and ramblings at
>> http://www.zefox.net/~fbsd [note, that's http, not https]
>> It's very poorly organized, but duckduckgo.com can be coaxed
>> to search that url via the syntax
>> [keyword] site:http://www.zefox.net/~fbsd
>> 
>> I'm not a programmer and so handicapped in what I can fix.
>> Support from the freebsd-arm@freebsd.org mailing list has
>> been essential to what success I've enjoyed.
> 
> You were luckier than I, then. I made a bad assumption that tier 1 
> support for a pi4 meant the pi5 would eventually get good support; it 
> didn't, at least not enough to run out of the box.

Tier 1 just means bugs will get fixed eventually. Aarch64 is tier 1,
so bugs reported on a Pi3 will get looked at and maybe fixed. Nothing
to be done about slow hardware. I too hope that Pi5, or maybe 6, will
get FreeBSD support eventually. But, Tier 1 does not promise platform 
support. I asked recently about Pi5 and heard only crickets. 

> 
>> 
>> Hope this helps, questions are welcome.
>> 
 bob prohaska

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
 * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

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