# Raspberry pi alternative that supports freebsd



## kutchbhi (Mar 10, 2019)

I got a pi zero wireless version. wiki says wifi with Freebsd won't work. But I have absolutely had it with linux. So many issues. Tiring..
Any embedded pi like boards that can fully run freebsd ? Ideally something popular, with wifi and cheap like the pi zero..

Thanks


----------



## aragats (Mar 10, 2019)

Most ARM SoC-based boards use SDIO interface for WiFi. The SDIO stack is just being implemented in FreeBSD, and still there is a lot to do. So, do not expect such WiFi chips to be working out of the box. However, many USB WiFi devices are supported.


----------



## ralphbsz (Mar 10, 2019)

Short answer: No.  At least not to my knowledge.

I tried running FreeBSD on a RPi3 for a few months.  Too many little issues.  I wasn't even trying to use WiFi (immediately gave up on that), since I had wired Ethernet available.  But many things that work effortlessly in Linux (like GPIO pins, Dallas 1-wire interfaces, ...) are somewhere between tedious, hard, and virtually impossible on FreeBSD.  Note that I'm not saying that these things are outright impossible on FreeBSD, only that it takes seconds or minutes to do them on Linux, and much longer on FreeBSD.

Then there is the RPi0w, where the only reasonable communication mechanism is WiFi, for which there is no support in FreeBSD yet.  And my forecast is that even after the SDIO problems are solved, that WiFi support on the RPi in FreeBSD will remain shaky for a long period.  USB is not a realistic alternative for me, since the RPi0 has too few USB interfaces (and in my application I already have something plugged in there), in particular no full-size USB interfaces, so WiFi over USB would turn into a salad of cables and USB hubs and extra power supplies.

Fortunately, I'm also a Linux user, so I know my way around it.  For home use, I greatly prefer FreeBSD, but in the face of the above problems, I switched my Pi's to Raspbian.  I have been mostly happy since; configuring a service using systemd was relatively painless, and my source code (which is pure Python) is nearly compatible between Raspbian and FreeBSD, after adjusting a few file paths.

For the future, I don't predict that there is going to be a lot of interest among FreeBSD developers for embedded solutions like the Pi.  Face it: FreeBSD is mostly an individual server operating system, in the mind of the developers.  We see that in sketchy support for desktop usage (it sort of works, but it is visible that not much effort goes into it), absence of large enterprise features (such as clustering and compatible VM/container features), and very little support for embedded usage.  That's the reality, and while we can complain about it, it is more productive to adapt to it.


----------

