Re: need your advice before new Raspberry Pi purchase

Hi,

> "As of early 2024, NetBSD does not support the Raspberry Pi 5."

I've lost interest in any new Raspberry Pi models since the 
corporatization of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. For higher performance ARM 
machines than the Raspberry Pi 4 hardware I already have, I'd go for a 
Rock Pro 5 or Orange Pi 5.

>    "RPI4 ethernet (Broadcom GENETv5) (but the man page for genet(4) is 
> missing)"
>
> Can I be sure that ethernet will work fine and reliable? Network speed?

There were some issues last year with npf which I observed on one of my 
RPi 4 systems, but that's been addressed(-ish - not fixed, but mitigated).

I've been running a RPi 4 with an uptime of 225 days as an NFS server for 
a fleet of machines that're running pkgsrc bulk builds.

> "Issues and Workarounds"
> "RPI4 xhci"

I've never run any RPi 4 hardware without UEFI, although I tried a few 
times and don't remember any successes.

One of the things that UEFI does provide is that it makes having a serial 
console very easy. My colocated RPi 4 was connected to an RPi 3 so that I 
could boot the 4 with a serial console, get access to UEFI menus, boot 
single user, et cetera. This, together with a GPIO on the RPi3 wired to be 
able to reset the RPi 4, makes the RPi very useful as a remote server.

> What is your final opinion about NetBSD in that board? Are there better 
> supported boards perhaps?

I think different hardware has different uses. For almost instant booting, 
low power and small size, I use NanoPi Neo. For hardware-based VPN, 
for NAT / IPv6 / DNS / DHCP, et cetera, I use NanoPi R2S. For systems that 
need PCIe, I use RockPro64.

I picked the Raspberry Pi 4 with a Flirc case for my 1U server because at 
the time it was not easy to find boards with 8 gigs of memory and with two 
USB 3 ports. I'm using the USB 3 ports to connect two large (8 TB) 
spinning rust disks in a raidframe mirror. For this configuration, it was 
ideal.

What do you plan to use your Pi for?

> Many thanks and sorry for so many questions, just I want to be sure that I am 
> going to make a good and useful purchase. If I purchase a Rpi 4 instead of 
> Rpi 5 to have NetBSD support and It does not work ok, it will be a absolute 
> nonsense.

Indeed. It's no fun to get something we can't use. The RPi 4 is very 
usable with NetBSD, although all of my experiences with things working 
very well is based on using UEFI.

> I appreciate your work very much and your comments and advice will be welcome 
> and very valuable for me.

:)

John Klos