Re: Status of RPi 3 (b) ?

[Christian Baer <christian.baer%uni-dortmund.de@localhost>]

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On 01/05/17 19:14, Swift Griggs wrote:

Good mornin'!

> I just picked up an RPI3. I guess I should have waited. A few 
> congenitally systemd-infected distros work on it, but not much 
> else. FreeBSD was a notable exception. It seems to work, but I 
> managed to hork up the SD card jacking around with ZFS before I 
> could test X11 and other stuff. No big deal.

Why would you do such a thing?

I have not tried FreeBSD on a Raspi yet. However, I have several other
machines running it - primarily because of ZFS. ZFS is a memory hog -
and a big fat one at that. This is no big deal on a server or
workstation with lots of RAM, but unfortunately, the Raspi doesn't
really fit into that category. Although I haven't really measured it,
I'm pretty sure that ZFS is also pretty heavy on the CPU (compared to
FFS). UFS/FFS with soft updates is probably a better choice for a
machine like a Raspi.

> However, before I start over, how about NetBSD? When I tried to 
> boot the gzimg on the SD card it just came up with what looked
> like a multicolor test pattern, but no boot etc... That was just a
> quick and dirty test. I could have been doing any number of things
> wrong. For one, I wasn't using -current.

This "multicolor test pattern" is the Raspi's way of telling you that
it can't load the OS. You have stated the reason quite well: The
Raspi3 only works with NetBSD current.

> My real question is: Does NetBSD work well enough on the RPi3 to 
> make it worth trying ? Also, could one of the anointed ones update 
> the RPI wiki for the RPi3 ? There is only a brief mention of the 
> RPi3 in the firmware section (nothing that helpful) and another 
> user in the comment section is seeing the exact same thing as me.

That depends. IIRC everything works fine apart from the wireless-stuff
(Wifi and Bluetooth). However, I have always found using any -current
OS to be extremely ball-busting. I'll grant you that NetBSD is a lot
more conservative (even in -current) than FreeBSD and especially most
Linux distros (which are completely bleeding edge). But even with
NetBSD it can happen that after an update (which you installed because
some feature was a little flaky), the system won't work anymore or you
just have a bug-change. Basically, not the best choice for a
production-system.

Kind regards,
Chris
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