Sunday, December 04, 2016

NetBSD on Raspberry Pi 3

I have used quite successfully a Raspberry Pi 2 running NetBSD 7 as a customer proxy and I assumed 7.0.2 would run on a Raspberry Pi 3.

As it turns out, the Raspberry Pi 3 ARM Cortex-A53 processor is different enough from the previous Cortex A7 processor we have on the Pi 2 that it needs some kernel changes.

And while the bleeding edge NetBSD current- does work on the Raspberry Pi 3, the stable NetBSD 7.0.2 does not.

I even tried to compile my own NetBSD 7.0.2 and backport the patch that added Pi 3 support, plus up-to-date firmware, but it seems it's not sufficient. There are probably more related commits that need backporting.

So, if you have a Raspberry Pi 3 you can only use current- builds. Go on the nightly build server, grab an .img.gz and test it out!

But if you want a stable NetBSD release, you'll have to wait some more or get a Raspberry Pi 2 instead.

Getting the Raspberry Pi 2 is not such a bad thing because the Raspberry Pi 3 wireless will probably not work for a while anyhow.

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