On 22/01/2026 01:15, Mike Easter wrote:
Tom Moore wrote:
Anyone have any suggestions as to what BSD based os works well on the
Raspberry Pi machines?
I'm looking at either FreeBSD or NetBSD.
Any ideas for one vs another?
I have a Pi 3b device here to play with.
The ARM is 64bit. The gpu is 32bit. The 3b is 1G, 32 bit will use less resources than 64, but...
There are a lot of bsd/s that are ARM.
Here's what FreeBSD says:
https://www.freebsd.org/platforms/arm/
Open:
https://www.openbsd.org/arm64.html (shows RPi3) https://www.openbsd.org/armv7.html (doesn't show RPi3)
Net:
http://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/aarch64/
... more dev is happening for 64bit.
FWIW I had freebsd running on a pi4 as a server; tier 1 support. I
bought a pi5 for more speed only to find no suggestion of proper support
in the foreseeable future. (Same for the other BSDs as far as I could tell.)
For various reasons (ease of maintenance; ease of swapping system disks between machines) I switched a year or so back, and now use mint on a
low power amd64. Runs at <5W, and is faster than the pi4.
--
Mike Scott
Harlow, England
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