FreeBSD on the raspberry pi

https://github.com/freebsd/crochet/pull/140

by zyngaro • 11 years ago

121 40 11 years ago

bcook• 11 years ago

I yearn for embedded *BSD routers.

anderiv• 11 years ago

The Netgate RCC-DFF 2220 is available[1] right now, and performs very well as a BSD router. It's not ARM, but it is an embedded system/SBC. I use it with pfSense, but it will run vanilla FreeBSD as well of course.

[1] http://store.netgate.com/ADI/RCC-DFF-2220.aspx

ysleepy• 11 years ago

There is some stuff: https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/mips

But no pretty Web UI. And Im pretty sure FreeBSD will not use the possibly existing network acceleration instructions that exists for example in the oceton soc.

mvanotti• 11 years ago

My biggest problem with fbsd in the rpi is that it's really hard to cross-compile ports for arm, and compiling everything in the rpi takes a lot of time (I think it was half a day to compile tmux in the rpi A).

skreuzer• 11 years ago

There has been quite a bit of work done to make cross compiling packages for ARM with poudriere. A fairly good tutorial on how to set that up can be found at https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/building-arm-packages-wit...

andrewchambers• 11 years ago

tcc is fast enough for an rpi, it is a shame gcc/clang are so slow.

echochar• 11 years ago

Can you run arm packages from a linux distrib under emulation?

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/linuxemu.html

toast0• 11 years ago

Unlikely -- that's for i386 only (amd64 update is being worked on, IIRC)

tobik• 11 years ago

Luckily there are now binary packages for armv6 on FreeBSD 11.0-CURRENT (which is really stable at this point).

markhahn• 11 years ago

to anyone who cares: why?

feld• 11 years ago

what part are you questioning? Why FreeBSD vs Linux?

before you downvote him further, consider that he has no idea the merits of running FreeBSD vs Linux.

Ensorceled2• 11 years ago

They are getting down voted because of the phrasing of the "question". If they had asked:

    "Why would you want to install FreeBSD instead of Linux? Are there advantages?"

They would have a got a list. Putting "who cares" in any part of the question sort begs for a down vote rather than an serious answer.

mwfunk2• 11 years ago

Obviously you think it's a waste of time- the burden is on you to explain why not. Not why you don't work on it yourself, but why you think people who are working on it shouldn't be.

something_234232• 11 years ago

I think it's a completely fair thing to politely ask why people are spending their time on this. Surely they have somg goal in mind.. Maybe they have some bigger goal, like commercial OS's tuned to the RPi or something that only BSD systems can do? Or maybe it's something simpler

anotherhue3• 11 years ago

I run FreeBSD and ZFS on my RPi-B as a cheap and cheerful destination for remote zfs send replication.

I wrote up a guide: https://github.com/hughobrien/zfs-remote-mirror

dpedu• 11 years ago

Nice work!

forinti2• 11 years ago

Great job. How does it perform? I thought ZFS needed tons of RAM.

jacquesm• 11 years ago

1G is not a lot of RAM?

awqrre• 11 years ago

The Raspberry-Pi can't perform that good because it lacks USB-3 or something else with good performance (it only has USB-2)... It is not a very good choice for a file server. The ODROID-XU4 seems like a much better choice even if it is double the price.

bespoke_engnr• 11 years ago

Aside from the "needs many gigs of RAM, even without deduplication turned on" angle, the lack of ECC memory would prevent me from using ZFS on raspi.

Sooner or later you will trash your data unless you're using ECC memory (which the Raspberry Pi RAM chips are not): http://louwrentius.com/please-use-zfs-with-ecc-memory.html

For the record, I also think it's cool to get this compiled and running on RasPi; just wanted to add the ECC info for anyone now thinking of doing something with this in production :-D.

klapinat0r2• 11 years ago

While I haven't tried crochet, I have tried building my own RPi-B+ image. You mention in your guide that you'll post updates "when you have something", and judging by your post it seems you have.

Since I had difficulties compiling the zfs (and one other, which I don't recall) module, I'm wondering if you'd care to share your experience in your guide?

Kudos to your very well thoughtout and thorough guide.

zyngaro2• 11 years ago

Give crochet a try. I've used it recently to build a FreeBSD 11 image for RPi B+ recently and it just works.

anotherhue3• 11 years ago

I got it going a few days ago, have been meaning to update the guide and post some images so people can skip the compilation. Star the repo for updates.

You're probably thinking of the opensolaris module. There's a small patch to apply and some KERNCONF to trigger the module build but otherwise its straightforward -- once you know where to look!

rleigh• 11 years ago

Interesting, I thought ZFS required a 64-bit system. Is this no longer the case? (I am using UFS on powerpc32 since it's not supported for 10.2.)

Freaky• 11 years ago

64-bit is very strongly recommended, but it does work on 32-bit with tuning: https://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSTuningGuide

xerography• 11 years ago

The title of this post -- "FreeBSD on the raspberry pi" -- is not very descriptive. The title seems to imply that running on the Raspberry Pi is news, which it's not, as myself or anyone else already running FreeBSD on our Pi can attest to. I'd suggest changing the title to "Patch posted to have FreeBSD use armv6hf target arch by default for the Raspberry Pi" -- however, someone just commented on the Pull Request:

armv6 is already hard float, all armv6hf gives you is it will pass floating-point data to functions in floating-point registers. I also expect that armv6 will be using the hard float ABI soon (within a month) an at this time armv6hf will be removed.

So maybe just remove the post all together?

zyngaro2• 11 years ago

OP here I agree with you it can be misleading into thinking that FreeBSD is _now_ available on the RPi which of course would be very misleading and simply untrue because FreeBSD on the RPi is nothing new. Reading the others comments, it's not misleading. Changing the title to what you have suggested would be nice for the FreeBSD devs mailing list and would not appeal to many people on HN. The point of the post is to draw attention to FreeBSD on the RPi and FreeBSD as it's really a great piece of software and__not__ to the patch itself. And I thing IMHO that the RPi can be great a great vector to enlarge the user base of FreeBSD with all the benefits that this can bring to the project.

FreeBSD on the raspberry pi

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