Hi all,
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.

Tom


=== MultiMail/Linux v0.52
--- SBBSecho 3.35-Linux
* Origin: telnet://cwshack.ddns.net:2330 (1:135/205)

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.
--
Mike Easter

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 22/01/2026 11:30, Tom Moore wrote:

Hi all,
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.

Tom

=== MultiMail/Linux v0.52

Take a look at https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/freebsd-14-1-release-on-raspberry-pi-4.93727/https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/freebsd-14-1-release-on-raspberry-pi-4.93727/

--
Chris

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Greetings, traveler ...

21 Jan 26 17:51:56, Tom Moore wrote to All:

Anyone have any suggestions as to what BSD based os works well on the Raspberry Pi machines?

I'm running NetBSD on RPi2 as home network dns/dhcp/https server for some local dashboards _and_ influxdb :)
Surprisingly, it all fits and works as a charm.

Absolutely can recommend trying NetBSD.

I'm looking at either FreeBSD or NetBSD.

TTY later,
\aID


--- gossipEd-darwin/amd64 2.1-dev-e965cfa1
* Origin: The Tower of Amon Sul (2:463/1331.1)

Mike Scott <usenet.16@scottsonline.org.uk.invalid> wrote:

On 22/01/2026 15:10, bp@www.zefox.net wrote:

Tom Moore <usenet@vk3heg.net> wrote:

Hi all,
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.

It really depends on what you expect to accomplish.

What do you want the machine to do?

The most troublesome aspect is limited RAM. If the loading is
light, it'll work fine. If you want the machine to self-host
some gyrations will be required. X with TWM will work, an X
desktop environment will be useless. I'm using Pi3s for name
service running bind9 from microSD. It seems to work acceptably.

The setup with pi4/freebsd worked reasonably well as a home server. Mine provided nfs, mail, web (apache and mojolicious), ntp, dns and dhcp on
only 4Gb ram. The main issue was that nfs bulk writes were very slow.

There's a vast difference between Pi3 and Pi4, chiefly memory. My FreeBSD
Pi4s use 8GB and self-host without swapping at all.

The crunch came when I tried processing a lot of images within a
mojolicious web server. It simply could not do the job fast enough. I suspect it was overheating and lowering the clock speed. The replacement amd64 runs many times faster.

How does the power consumption compare?

Was the Pi4 cpu-bound, or memory-bound? Swap on USB3 might help,
especially if SSD. If it's thermal limiting a fan will help.

I've a collection of notes and ramblings at
http://www.zefox.net/~fbsd [note, that's http, not https]
It's very poorly organized, but duckduckgo.com can be coaxed
to search that url via the syntax
[keyword] site:http://www.zefox.net/~fbsd

I'm not a programmer and so handicapped in what I can fix.
Support from the freebsd-arm@freebsd.org mailing list has
been essential to what success I've enjoyed.

You were luckier than I, then. I made a bad assumption that tier 1
support for a pi4 meant the pi5 would eventually get good support; it didn't, at least not enough to run out of the box.

Tier 1 just means bugs will get fixed eventually. Aarch64 is tier 1,
so bugs reported on a Pi3 will get looked at and maybe fixed. Nothing
to be done about slow hardware. I too hope that Pi5, or maybe 6, will
get FreeBSD support eventually. But, Tier 1 does not promise platform
support. I asked recently about Pi5 and heard only crickets.

Hope this helps, questions are welcome.

bob prohaska

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 22/01/2026 15:10, bp@www.zefox.net wrote:

Tom Moore <usenet@vk3heg.net> wrote:

Hi all,
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.

It really depends on what you expect to accomplish.

What do you want the machine to do?

The most troublesome aspect is limited RAM. If the loading is
light, it'll work fine. If you want the machine to self-host
some gyrations will be required. X with TWM will work, an X
desktop environment will be useless. I'm using Pi3s for name
service running bind9 from microSD. It seems to work acceptably.

The setup with pi4/freebsd worked reasonably well as a home server. Mine provided nfs, mail, web (apache and mojolicious), ntp, dns and dhcp on
only 4Gb ram. The main issue was that nfs bulk writes were very slow.

The crunch came when I tried processing a lot of images within a
mojolicious web server. It simply could not do the job fast enough. I
suspect it was overheating and lowering the clock speed. The replacement
amd64 runs many times faster.

I've a collection of notes and ramblings at
http://www.zefox.net/~fbsd [note, that's http, not https]
It's very poorly organized, but duckduckgo.com can be coaxed
to search that url via the syntax
[keyword] site:http://www.zefox.net/~fbsd

I'm not a programmer and so handicapped in what I can fix.
Support from the freebsd-arm@freebsd.org mailing list has
been essential to what success I've enjoyed.

You were luckier than I, then. I made a bad assumption that tier 1
support for a pi4 meant the pi5 would eventually get good support; it
didn't, at least not enough to run out of the box.

Hope this helps, questions are welcome.

bob prohaska

--
Mike Scott
Harlow, England

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

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

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 22/01/2026 11:30, 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.

OpenBSD (I know, not what you asked) has some explicit support for Pi5.

I'm not sure whether

"Added support for Raspberry Pi 5 (with console on serial port)."

means that you can only run it on a serial terminal connected to the Pi
-- IOW no desktop -- or what. I haven't tried it.

https://www.openbsd.org/78.html

--
Cheers,
Daniel.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)