raspberry pi 4

[Greg V]

On July 10, 2019 5:32:04 AM GMT+03:00, Denis Polygalov <dpolyg at gmail.com> wrote:
>Dear Greg,
>
>thanks for a lot of useful information.
>I was completely unaware that these boards doesn't look
>as good from inside as from outside.

They're good for what they are. Just keep in mind that they are embedded boards, not workstations, so don't get too excited when you see a PCIe slot.

>Could you please provide your opinion about
>perspectives of NanoPi M4 + FreeBSD combination?

It's a Rockchip RK3399 board, essentially the same as a ROCKPro64. It works, but requires some tinkering (kernel patches to enable more devices).

It's okay if you just want a headless FreeBSD/aarch64 box to compile and test software on. Having two A72 cores is better than only having ultra low power joke cores (A53), but the mixing of the cores (big.LITTLE) is "fun" – FreeBSD's ULE scheduler is not really aware of it, so you can't tell it to, say, "fill up the fast cores first". So you can cpuset your compile job to the fast cores and not benefit from the A53 ones at all, or not cpuset and see the A72s idle sometimes. So an RPi 4 (when supported) would be better – all 4 cores are fast cores!

If you want to use an RK3399 device as a desktop/laptop.. use Linux. You can run FreeBSD in KVM :)

If you specifically want an aarch64 FBSD desktop because you're weird like me… the only "affordable" option right now is the MACCHIATObin, and it's not super fast (funnily enough, same core configuration as an RPi4, only a clock speed and memory advantage) and has a giant network interface that's not supported by FreeBSD. But it runs upstream EDK2 (TianoCore) firmware, with working PCIe under ACPI!

SolidRun are working on a new device (HoneyComb LX2K) that's going to be more powerful (NXP chip with 16 A72 cores, dual channel RAM, overclocking) and with more PCIe lanes (8x slot + M.2 slot)… and another network card FreeBSD does not have a driver for :D Hopefully PCIe under ACPI works, they said they're working on ARM SBSA compliance, but some experts were skeptical about that. I also hope the firmware will be open, but I don't think they promised that yet.