8 ms·

FreeBSD on the raspberry pi

121 points by zyngaro 11y ago

bcook 11y ago
I yearn for embedded *BSD routers.
- anderiv 11y 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 http://store.netgate.com/ADI/RCC-DFF-2220.aspx
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- ysleepy 11y ago
  There is some stuff: https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/mips 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.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
mvanotti 11y 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 11y 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-with-poudriere-the-simple-way.52994/ https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/building-arm-packages-wit...
- andrewchambers 11y ago
  tcc is fast enough for an rpi, it is a shame gcc/clang are so slow.
- echochar 11y ago
  Can you run arm packages from a linux distrib under emulation? https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/linuxemu.html https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/linuxemu.html
  - toast0 11y ago
    Unlikely -- that's for i386 only (amd64 update is being worked on, IIRC)
- tobik 11y ago
  Luckily there are now binary packages for armv6 on FreeBSD 11.0-CURRENT (which is really stable at this point).
markhahn 11y ago
to anyone who cares: why?
- feld 11y 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.
  - Ensorceled 11y 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.
- mwfunk 11y 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_23423 11y 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
    - mwfunk 11y ago
      Of course that's a fair thing to ask, but that post wasn't asking that question. That post wasn't asking a question at all, it was clearly intended as an insulting statement in the form of a question.
      - 11y ago
anotherhue 11y 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 https://github.com/hughobrien/zfs-remote-mirror
- dpedu 11y ago
  Nice work!
- forinti 11y ago
  Great job. How does it perform? I thought ZFS needed tons of RAM.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    1G is not a lot of RAM?
    - forinti 11y ago
      Apparently, ZFS needs 1GB of RAM per 1TB of storage.
      - masklinn 11y ago
        You're probably thinking of deduplication (whose memory requirements is ~320 bytes per deduplicated block, and which generally requires way more than 1GB per TB, it's highly variable depending on storage load but I've seen quotes from 5 to 20GB/TB). Most users don't benefit from deduplication and it's usually recommended not to enable it unless you do demonstrably get large benefits from it (on FreeBSD, `zdb -S` will simulate and estimate deduplication benefits). 1GB is the recommended conf for ZFS on FreeBSD, it will benefit from more (and may need some tuning below 2GB) but even that's not a requirement, the FreeBSD wiki's ZFS tuning page quotes "ZFS running nicely on a laptop with 768 Megs of physical RAM" with tuning (and provides configuration values).
        11y ago
xerography 11y 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?
- zyngaro 11y 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.

121 points by zyngaro 11y ago

bcook 11y ago

I yearn for embedded *BSD routers.

anderiv 11y 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 http://store.netgate.com/ADI/RCC-DFF-2220.aspx
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
ysleepy 11y ago
There is some stuff: https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/mips 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.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

mvanotti 11y 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 11y 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-with-poudriere-the-simple-way.52994/ https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/building-arm-packages-wit...
andrewchambers 11y ago
tcc is fast enough for an rpi, it is a shame gcc/clang are so slow.
echochar 11y ago
Can you run arm packages from a linux distrib under emulation? https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/linuxemu.html https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/linuxemu.html
- toast0 11y ago
  Unlikely -- that's for i386 only (amd64 update is being worked on, IIRC)
tobik 11y ago
Luckily there are now binary packages for armv6 on FreeBSD 11.0-CURRENT (which is really stable at this point).

markhahn 11y ago

to anyone who cares: why?

feld 11y 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.
- Ensorceled 11y 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.
mwfunk 11y 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_23423 11y 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
  - mwfunk 11y ago
    Of course that's a fair thing to ask, but that post wasn't asking that question. That post wasn't asking a question at all, it was clearly intended as an insulting statement in the form of a question.
    - 11y ago

anotherhue 11y 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 https://github.com/hughobrien/zfs-remote-mirror

dpedu 11y ago
Nice work!
forinti 11y ago
Great job. How does it perform? I thought ZFS needed tons of RAM.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  1G is not a lot of RAM?
  - forinti 11y ago
    Apparently, ZFS needs 1GB of RAM per 1TB of storage.
    - masklinn 11y ago
      You're probably thinking of deduplication (whose memory requirements is ~320 bytes per deduplicated block, and which generally requires way more than 1GB per TB, it's highly variable depending on storage load but I've seen quotes from 5 to 20GB/TB). Most users don't benefit from deduplication and it's usually recommended not to enable it unless you do demonstrably get large benefits from it (on FreeBSD, `zdb -S` will simulate and estimate deduplication benefits). 1GB is the recommended conf for ZFS on FreeBSD, it will benefit from more (and may need some tuning below 2GB) but even that's not a requirement, the FreeBSD wiki's ZFS tuning page quotes "ZFS running nicely on a laptop with 768 Megs of physical RAM" with tuning (and provides configuration values).
      - 11y ago

xerography 11y 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?

zyngaro 11y 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.