Neat! I didn't know OpenBSD had any Raspberry Pi support, anyone around with any experience? I have an extra 4 or to and "do stuff with OpenBSD" has been on my list for a while.
I have used OpenBSD on first a Raspberry Pi 3 and then 4. I liked it, until one day the system stopped responding on either SSH and the serial port, so I had to cut the power to reboot. That's fine, these things happen, but I lost several system files in the process and I couldn't figure out which ones. I only noticed because some things no longer worked and there were some files in /usr's lost+found.
OpenBSD's file system does not have journalling. Their closest equivalent, soft updates, was removed some versions ago, so that they can add journalling later. Until that happens, I will install OpenBSD anywhere again.
That's a shame because apart from that, it really is a good operating system. The documentation is excellent and there are some great services in base. I much prefer OpenSMTPD over Postfix, for example, because it's just a lot simpler and I don't feel unsure if I've missed some option that I really needed to change for the system to be secure.
One thing cool about OpenBSD is that the base OS has a lot of things out of the box. I think a lot of OpenBSD-fied tools like httpd, spamd are part of the base OS. You can even setup wireguard tunnels using nothing but ifconfig.
For starters, Linux is messy. Each distro is different from each other with little consistency. There are even distros specific to device families, like the Raspberry Pi.
Sometimes we don't want to have to keep around a cheat sheet so we can have commands we're accustomed to, then we have the corresponding ones we need to know for a separate device.
The BSDs are much cleaner and more consistent. You can run the same OS on your desktop and your Arm machine. Tinkering is fine, but there's a time and a place for everything, and sometimes we just want to run stuff and tinker with what we're running, not necessarily with the underlying OS.
“WiFi on the Raspberry Pi 5 Model B "d0" boards doesn't work.”
OBSD reports
> “The 4GB and 8GB variants of Raspberry Pi 5 are built around two key chips: the RP1 I/O controller, developed here at Raspberry Pi and providing the interfacing capabilities of the platform; and BCM2712C1, a 16nm application processor built by our friends at Broadcom. BCM2712C1 is a hugely complex and powerful device, with a quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 application processor running at 2.4GHz, and the latest iteration of the VideoCore multimedia platform. Alongside the features required to power a Raspberry Pi, it also contains functionality intended to serve other markets, which we don’t need. This ‘dark silicon’ is permanently disabled in the chips we use, but takes up die space, and therefore adds cost. The new D0 stepping strips away all that unneeded functionality, leaving only the bits we need.”
This is what Eben Upton reported on 19th Aug 2024. [0] and Geoff Geerling makes a comment on chip revisions. [1]
> “Steppings are basically chip revisions where they don't change functionality, and usually just fix bugs, or tweak the layout. But even tiny design changes could have unintended consequences.”
So the dark silicon removal step from BCC1 to BCD0, a cost cutting measure, killed wifi? Damn, I was hoping to use this for a obsd firewall.
Nice to see BSDs up and working on new RPi hardware. Is there even (mainline) linux support for RPi5 and CM5 nowadays? For what seemed like ages they were unsupported (no usable IO) and I avoided using any of the newer boards for projects as a result, but it's years after the hardware release now so I assume most things must finally be upstreamed?
I don't remember U-boot support being missing for so long on Raspberry Pi 4. Is there something unique about the Raspberry Pi 5 that makes U-boot support harder?
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 48.7 ms ] threadOpenBSD's file system does not have journalling. Their closest equivalent, soft updates, was removed some versions ago, so that they can add journalling later. Until that happens, I will install OpenBSD anywhere again.
That's a shame because apart from that, it really is a good operating system. The documentation is excellent and there are some great services in base. I much prefer OpenSMTPD over Postfix, for example, because it's just a lot simpler and I don't feel unsure if I've missed some option that I really needed to change for the system to be secure.
Wait what? How is this the OS's sole role?
What is the mcu the rpi5 has onboard even for?
Sometimes we don't want to have to keep around a cheat sheet so we can have commands we're accustomed to, then we have the corresponding ones we need to know for a separate device.
The BSDs are much cleaner and more consistent. You can run the same OS on your desktop and your Arm machine. Tinkering is fine, but there's a time and a place for everything, and sometimes we just want to run stuff and tinker with what we're running, not necessarily with the underlying OS.
OBSD reports
> “The 4GB and 8GB variants of Raspberry Pi 5 are built around two key chips: the RP1 I/O controller, developed here at Raspberry Pi and providing the interfacing capabilities of the platform; and BCM2712C1, a 16nm application processor built by our friends at Broadcom. BCM2712C1 is a hugely complex and powerful device, with a quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 application processor running at 2.4GHz, and the latest iteration of the VideoCore multimedia platform. Alongside the features required to power a Raspberry Pi, it also contains functionality intended to serve other markets, which we don’t need. This ‘dark silicon’ is permanently disabled in the chips we use, but takes up die space, and therefore adds cost. The new D0 stepping strips away all that unneeded functionality, leaving only the bits we need.”
This is what Eben Upton reported on 19th Aug 2024. [0] and Geoff Geerling makes a comment on chip revisions. [1]
> “Steppings are basically chip revisions where they don't change functionality, and usually just fix bugs, or tweak the layout. But even tiny design changes could have unintended consequences.”
So the dark silicon removal step from BCC1 to BCD0, a cost cutting measure, killed wifi? Damn, I was hoping to use this for a obsd firewall.
Cf:
[0] <https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/2gb-raspberry-pi-5-on-sale-...>
[1] < https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/new-2gb-pi-5-has-33-s...>
The boards that have the D0 parts have other changes as well.
Lack of WiFi shouldn’t be a problem for a firewall board, unless you’re planning to make it a WiFi router/AP as well.
https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/ee2db53800abe0382657ec...