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NetBSD because I love simplicity and because it draws less power than running Raspbian. It is running Gitea, Prometheus and a bunch of small tools I wrote (wea

by agalush 11mo ago

NetBSD because I love simplicity and because it draws less power than running Raspbian. It is running Gitea, Prometheus and a bunch of small tools I wrote (weather monitoring, home automation, family data sharing and tools for my Kids)

wltr 11mo ago
But how is it draw less power comparing to Raspbian? I’m not arguing, just curious how you measured that, and why NetBSD that much more efficient. I have a RPi2 with Raspbian, and another one with DietPi, I expect them to sip power similarly, considering they’re mostly idle anyway. Would love to read some blog on this though, if you happen to have one.
- agalush 11mo ago
  I just measured it by myself with a domestic power usage tool.
  - galangalalgol 11mo ago
    That is fascinating, one of the reasons I hadn't done that is a concern about power management features. I'd read openbsd at least had them running flat out most of the time.
- raddan 11mo ago
  I too would like to see a side-by-side comparison but if we assume that the claim is true, one reason might be that NetBSD runs very few daemons after a default install. I run NetBSD on a handful of Raspberry Pi Zero machines, and it is really quite a surprise that they run as well as they do for a $5 computer. Your typical Raspbian install has a lot more going on after the default install.
  - cosmic_cheese 11mo ago
    > Your typical Raspbian install has a lot more going on after the default install. I believe that this is true for just about all widely popular distributions. It's probably possible to set up Arch to have power draw similar to NetBSD, but you're going to have to know what you're doing and it's probably going to require more administration/attention to keep running smoothly than NetBSD does.
    - wltr 11mo ago
      I had Arch installed on my RPi2s, but I didn’t like the need to update the RPi that frequently, wearing off the SD card. And later on, it became unsupported by Arch ARM. Now I use DietPi, and it’s my favourite Linux distribution (for an SBC server) so far. It has very small number of processes running too). So that’s why I’m curious whether it would be much different with NetBSD.
  - 1313ed01 11mo ago
    Do you use the built-in WiFi on any of the Raspberry Pis? By coincidence I installed NetBSD last weekend on a Raspberry Pi. Never used it before, but it seemed very nice. I had some issues with sshd (most likely just me doing something stupid) and never got as far as experimenting with WiFi, but supposedly there is some support (unlike FreeBSD and OpenBSD that do not support WiFi on any Raspberry Pis?).
    - raddan 11mo ago
      Not with any of the BSDs, although I have tried. Instead I either use a USB to GigE adapter or a Waveshare carrier board (for the Zeros). The built in NICs for the ones that have them usually work fine. If you really need wireless you can buy a USB WiFi dongle, and since there is a lot of support a compatible one is restively easy to find.

by agalush 11mo ago

wltr 11mo ago

But how is it draw less power comparing to Raspbian? I’m not arguing, just curious how you measured that, and why NetBSD that much more efficient. I have a RPi2 with Raspbian, and another one with DietPi, I expect them to sip power similarly, considering they’re mostly idle anyway. Would love to read some blog on this though, if you happen to have one.

agalush 11mo ago
I just measured it by myself with a domestic power usage tool.
- galangalalgol 11mo ago
  That is fascinating, one of the reasons I hadn't done that is a concern about power management features. I'd read openbsd at least had them running flat out most of the time.
raddan 11mo ago
I too would like to see a side-by-side comparison but if we assume that the claim is true, one reason might be that NetBSD runs very few daemons after a default install. I run NetBSD on a handful of Raspberry Pi Zero machines, and it is really quite a surprise that they run as well as they do for a $5 computer. Your typical Raspbian install has a lot more going on after the default install.
- cosmic_cheese 11mo ago
  > Your typical Raspbian install has a lot more going on after the default install. I believe that this is true for just about all widely popular distributions. It's probably possible to set up Arch to have power draw similar to NetBSD, but you're going to have to know what you're doing and it's probably going to require more administration/attention to keep running smoothly than NetBSD does.
  - wltr 11mo ago
    I had Arch installed on my RPi2s, but I didn’t like the need to update the RPi that frequently, wearing off the SD card. And later on, it became unsupported by Arch ARM. Now I use DietPi, and it’s my favourite Linux distribution (for an SBC server) so far. It has very small number of processes running too). So that’s why I’m curious whether it would be much different with NetBSD.
- 1313ed01 11mo ago
  Do you use the built-in WiFi on any of the Raspberry Pis? By coincidence I installed NetBSD last weekend on a Raspberry Pi. Never used it before, but it seemed very nice. I had some issues with sshd (most likely just me doing something stupid) and never got as far as experimenting with WiFi, but supposedly there is some support (unlike FreeBSD and OpenBSD that do not support WiFi on any Raspberry Pis?).
  - raddan 11mo ago
    Not with any of the BSDs, although I have tried. Instead I either use a USB to GigE adapter or a Waveshare carrier board (for the Zeros). The built in NICs for the ones that have them usually work fine. If you really need wireless you can buy a USB WiFi dongle, and since there is a lot of support a compatible one is restively easy to find.