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Comment by snvzz | Hacker News Reader

Netbsd is often a better fit for the older or more resource constrained machines.

There is a small group of folks who try to keep a FreeBSD configuration alive that fits on these tiny 16-32M machines as well: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-wifi-build .

E.g., this hardware has 16MB of RAM and 4MB of flash: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-wifi-build/blob/master/bu...

32MB RAM: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-wifi-build/blob/master/bu...

I agree, or even something like openwrt. This was just to see if it could be done, it’s not the most practical OS for the hardware but it runs pretty well!

OpenWRT no longer supports devices with the 4MB ROM or 32MB RAM

Yeah, I encountered this. Repurposed my Netgear WNR1000 v2 with OpenWrt to act as a bridge to connect wired devices to my network. While it has served this role flawlessly for 5+ years, it's frozen in time running an old kernel. The write-up as to why they had to drop support is a good read. [1]

[1] https://openwrt.org/supported_devices/432_warning

>OpenWRT no longer supports devices with the 4MB ROM or 32MB RAM

So no new zipit z2 port? I doudbt it...

i doubt NetBSD has drivers for this SoC

It doesn’t, it’s Linux only for now. Unless someone builds uboot for bsd. Even then there would be a huge amount of work to do to get it running stable.

It supports (and I've run it on) some allwinner families. Apparently not this device, as far as I can tell.

https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/evbarm/allwinner/

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