Re: Oversimplification

On Sun, 30 May 2021 17:49:01 -0400, George Mitchell
<george+freebsd@m5p.com> wrote:

> I've never been shy about oversimplifying complex questions, so here
> goes: What's the ARM system that presents the least hassle to a
> prospective FreeBSD user?  Here's what I mean by low hassle:
> 
> 1. Widely available.
> 2. Runs some standard FreeBSD image with minimal (or no) tweaking.
> 3. I suspect ARM64 means less hassle than ARM32.
> 4. Friendly to an external high-speed (at least USB 3; possibly SATA?)
>     disk.
> 5. Hopefully 8GB on-board memory, though 4GB is probably okay if high
>     speed swapping is available (see point 4).
> 6. Affordable, but not cheap.
> 
> And next on my Santa list ...                            -- George
> 

Did you consider RockPro64 from pine64.com? Two models are available,
with 2 GB RAM and 4 GB RAM. There is PCIe x4 slot, USB ports (3.0 and
2.0, four total), so your prerequisites are probably met. Also, you can
download FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-ROCKPRO64.img.xz from
FreeBSD ftp site and start.

I could test it in past for some days and it worked. I did not have
opportunity to test what could be connected to PCIe slot, but from the
same vendor some cards could be had as well - dual SATA-II or M.2/NGFF
interface card.

Just one a bit odd detail using stock image - console line speed was
1.5 Mb/s. I spent some time figuring this. 4 GB version currently out
of stock, unfortunately.

They are preparing Quartz64 card, up to 8 GB RAM, no ETA yet.

Regards,
Milan