Re: Raspberry PI information

> Hello, and happy solstice!

Likewise!

> The ARM ecosystem is large, and NetBSD supports many, many boards. It
> may come as no surprise to learn there are several ways to do many
> things, and the reasons to choose one over another aren't always clear
> or easy to discover.

So I've gathered...

> It'd be nice to have as much of this information in one place as
> possible.
>
> I'll try to answer what I can :)

Thanks for the answers so far!

>> Sorry for this being a bit negative; I'm willing to work with
>> whoever is able to provide me with accurate information in this
>> area.
>
> It's not negative, in my opinion, to express a bit of exasperation now
> and then, particularly when it's in the interest of doing something
> constructive :)

Thanks, that was my hope.

> I'm happy to help however I can. I've collected lots of notes over the
> years - perhaps I should go through them and see what can be used in
> NetBSD's documentation.

Sounds good.

>> 1: status of RPI5 support:
>>  As of early 2024, NetBSD does not support the Raspberry Pi 5.
>> but later under "NetBSD current" (unspecified version):
>>  RPI5 general support (UEFI firmware required)
>> so which is it?
>
> I got one, and NetBSD under UEFI runs on it, but the last time I
> checked (October, I think), ethernet didn't work and NetBSD can't
> change the processor frequency, so it needs to be set in the UEFI
> menus. I don't remember the status of wifi / Bluetooth.

Hm, OK.  I sense a future with an USB-ethernet adapter, and I get
the added fun of figuring out which products work with which
driver and which ones are supported by NetBSD...

> This could be improved, for sure. Other systems, like the Orange Pi 5,
> work surprisingly well with UEFI, much better than with native
> booting.

OK, noted.

>> and which starts by talking about raspi-config.  Is that program
>> even available on NetBSD?
>
> No, it isn't. In the past, most documentation had information about
> making changes to config.txt and cmdline.txt, but more recent
> documentation suggests raspi-config without explaining the actual
> changes.

Right, I suspected something like that...

>> Always referring to the "upstream" documentation gives the task
>> of distringuishing betwen "system-dependent" and "Linux-
>> dependent" parts of the documentation, and then finding out how
>> to do the corresponding task in NetBSD is left as a task for the
>> user to figure out.
>
> Yes, this makes it hard for me even though I've been using Raspberry
> Pis of every kind since they came out. I can only wonder at what a
> beginner would make of it.

On the ARM hardware front that's basically where I am at the
moment.

Send me a note if you want or need help to write, or to reivew
modifications; I can play inexperienced arm hardware user all day :)

The goal should be to make it a bit easier for new users to start
using this hardware + OS combination.

Regards,

- Håvard