Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxioatic | Hacker News Reader

> We will also be suggesting one or more low-cost reference platforms for FreeBSD/arm64.

A boy can dream this would be the Pi.

This is pretty unlikely, unfortunately. We're generally looking out for a Pi maintainer because it doesn't really have one -- it's not the most desirable platform to hack on, from a developer POV.

Hmm, bummer. Curious as to why it's not that desirable, and is there something else you would rather use?

Speaking from personal experience, it's an absolute pain -- they're already an odd duck (w.r.t. booting, for instance), add on that the documentation is incredibly lacking compared to competitors and you've got a platform that's not too appetizing.

Allwinner and Rockchip tend to be pretty solid, as far as SoC go; start here: https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm

I’m curious about what documentation is lacking? I’ve been collecting technical documentation on the RPI4 because I’m trying to understand the platform well, and maybe I’ve come across something that can help?

Pretty much anything that would need to come from Broadcom, really

The docs that most recently bit us are pcie/ethernet on the RPi4; I got in touch with Broadcom, who is now in a multi-year effort to figure out how to disperse usable docs (under NDA?) to the broader community. I lost faith after 9ish months of poking and getting back "oh, you know how it is" in response.

Are you saying this as a FreeBSD core development team member?

I speak as a FreeBSD developer who has dabbled with RPi, having tested and shuffled in a lot of the initial RPi4 patches and did some not-insignificant hacking to get a single RPi image to actually support RPi3 + RPi4.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com