RaspBSD – FreeBSD images for the Raspberry Pi | Hacker News Reader

RaspBSD – FreeBSD images for the Raspberry Pi

raspbsd.org

126 pointsfcambus19 comments

How does FreeBSD work with the GPIO pins, and also things like i2c ? I'd love to not use Linux, but i use my Raspi as more than just a tiny computer

FreeBSD has full support for GPIO and i2c on both the RPi 1 and 2. Simple wrappers around FreeBSD's GPIO ioctl can be found at https://github.com/gonzoua/freebsd-gpio

I'm more curious if WiringPi is usable or ported over?

I put FreeBSD on my Raspberry Pi B a few months back. (Similar images were previously published as well.)

I had to abandon the project, though, because there were very limited binary ports and base-system updates available. Compiling things on the Pi is a pain when possible at all. I did get a fairly decent cross-compile setup going, but in the end, it was more trouble than it was worth.

I was pleased to see the following on this site:

> Currently work is ongoing to build and publish offical FreeBSD packages. Once those are published, these images will use them.

Why aren't such images available at the official location http://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/arm/ (or a mirror) ?

There are official images http://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/arm/armv6/ISO-I... . This project seems to be aiming to be the PC-BSD for arm-based boards, with different defaults for people new to FreeBSD, etc.

I would love to see pfSense (based on FreeBSD) on the Banana Pi. It has a real gigabit NIC :)

I thought the RPi 2 was armv7, why is the image for it using armv6?

Does BSD support fat/multi-architecture binaries?

It's the same approach the official Linux Raspberry PI images follow that way you can support all raspberry pi versions with a single images.

There potentially could be an speed up by rebuilding everything for armv7 (specially for NEON-fp) but no one has done it yet.

Any idea what kind of speedup one could expect?

I don't know, but I would assume it's similar to setting CPUTYPE in your make.conf so binaries are built with some cpu-specific asm for your specific flavor of x86 CPU: you'll get a performance boost, but nothing mind-blowing.

Because, on FreeBSD, armv6 is for 32-bit ARMv6 and later platforms. The userland is shared between all armv6 SoCs, however the kernel is targeted depending on the architectures it will boot on and will be built for ARMv7 when applicable.

That's awesome, it's always great to have more choices of OS. Cool to see they're looking at other boards like the BeagleBone Black too.

I've tried freeBSD in a Raspberry Pi 1, but I couldn't get any binaries precompiled for ARM :(. I would like to have an easy way to cross-compile ports from my main machine.

Take a look here: http://blog.ignoranthack.me/?p=212

Is there something similar for the Cubietruck?

https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/arm/Cubieboard

might be nice to have this freebsd on an intel edison too

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