# Raspberry pi 3 B+ support



## 8bitGlitch (Jan 31, 2021)

I just got a Raspberry pi 3 B+, and I saw that the aarch64 architecture was supported. Raspberry being a ARM cpu, wanted to hear if folks have installed it on the Pi and how well it is supported? What surprises me - all the talk in the maker community, and all the big name Linux distro off load their ARM distro support to a different community and not the main community. From what I could tell (could be wrong) Ubuntu is the only distro that has official support for ARM. Is that latter true with FreeBSD and it is the same main community initiative? On a side note - I see version 13 of FreeBSD is getting RISC-V support, I am looking forward to that to toy around with stuff.


----------



## diizzy (Jan 31, 2021)

If you want to play around with aarch64 you're much better off with Allwinner or Rockchip, RPi3 should work I suppose but there are more or less frequently mails on the mailing list about RPis.


			arm - FreeBSD Wiki
		



			arm/Raspberry Pi - FreeBSD Wiki
		

The RockPro64 runs great on 13.0-ALPHA2


----------



## 8bitGlitch (Jan 31, 2021)

diizzy said:


> If you want to play around with aarch64 you're much better off with Allwinner or Rockchip, RPi3 should work I suppose but there are more or less frequently mails on the mailing list about RPis.
> 
> 
> arm - FreeBSD Wiki
> ...



Thank you for the insight and links. Do you the 'RockPro64' yourself, and if so what are the big differences? I am not a hardware or coder or developer by any means; however, I have a big interest in embedded/ARM design and just to toy around with items as a hobby to learn electronics.

Would be nice to have the days of a C64/C128 that boots right into a OS that is also the programming environment say something super light weight like Lua or Tcl that can be embedded. I know all the cool kids use Python; however, I just don't get the hype of it - Perl and Tcl were doing it years before. Anyway... back on point.

I would love to hear from your experience with any of the FreeBSD support boards. I just started so go slow, and I will try to keep up.


----------



## diizzy (Jan 31, 2021)

RockPro64 and Rock Pi 4(A) (same SoC) and Allwinner H5 (Orange Pi PC2), A64 (Pine A64) pretty much works like your amd64 (x86-64) box with the limitations of less RAM and slower CPU. There are a few quirks such as no RTC support (ie you need to run ntp on each boot up) but they work well in general. There is however very limited display support so consider ARM to be headless boxes for now. Keep in mind that you most likely want to run 13 which at least for now means limited package availability unless you're going to use ports (4Gb RAM is highly and external storage/eMMC recommended, 2Gb can be doable but you'll run into countless of issue with only 1Gb).

I only have the first 3 mentioned but I know people using Allwinner A64 boards just fine.


----------



## 8bitGlitch (Jan 31, 2021)

diizzy said:


> RockPro64 and Rock Pi 4(A) (same SoC)


From my quick searching, it looks like this board is more expensive then the Raspberry. Historically, do you know why RockPro and Rock Pi were selected over the Raspberry? It does appear Broadcom is used in the Raspberry from some items, and I know historically they have had a rocky relationship with opensource. 

Either way, it looks like the RockPro64 might be a better board, but again... I am still learning and the whole ARM cpu ecosystem is very new to me, so I could be mistaken.


----------



## diizzy (Jan 31, 2021)

They're slight more expensive but hexa-core and much better documentation and design overall (the "desktop size" PCIe slot on the RockPro64 is also a nice addition).
The 4Gb model of Rock Pi 4 is 65$ over at seeedstudio while rockpro64 is 79$, the variants with less ram are cheaper however.

The Allwinner boards are cheaper however in general


----------



## Maselko (Feb 22, 2021)

Hi, I am running FreeBSD 12.2 on raspberry pi 3B+ and it works nicely. The largest problem here is if you want to use Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, you need to buy usb dongle that has a chip with working driver. It costs $10-ish so it is not a large issue but still a bit of pain. Another problem is that there are no aarch64 ports for major desktop environments. I am more of a person using window managers so that was not a problem but for some people it can be a problem. None of the major desktop environments work but funnily enough I have managed to make good old CDE work. It is not perfect, it looks super old and it is not supported well but works and it's very lightweight. If you are interested, here is the code that works (not maintained so worth checking original sourceforge one first).


----------



## debguy (Feb 26, 2021)

Wolfram: Computation Meets Knowledge
					

Wolfram, creators of the Wolfram Language, Wolfram|Alpha, Mathematica, Development Platform, Data Science Platform, Finance Platform, SystemModeler...



					www.wolfram.com
				




Mathematica has for at least a few year has had a program of offering free Rasberry Pi running Mathematica on Pi using freeBSD.

I'm not sure if you consider that "full support of PI".  But you might look into what they have going on with PI.  I think they have some hardware pluggins/sensors that mm can talk to, audio, 3D.  I know it's no equal to MM on a full platform, but it's cool.


----------

