[HH] proprietary CPUs

[Ask Bjørn Hansen]

On May 27, 2012, at 12:37, Tom Metro wrote:

> So the impression I get is that while MIPS support is still immature on
> FreeBSD, it does sound like they are largely being held back by the
> proprietary nature of thees CPUs.

My impression is that relatively more of the people working on FreeBSD ports are doing it to get a kernel and basic user space for a commercial project or product and less people taking weeks or months out of their life to save $50 on a cheaper CPE box.  :-)   (So support is good for specific combinations of boards/chips that people have used in commercial projects).

Personally I use FreeBSD on Soekris and PC Engines boards almost entirely because NanoBSD[1] makes it relatively easy to build an easy to upgrade/backup/replace distribution suitable for consumer grade compact flash cards (read-only).

I started doing it when 256MB CFs were a reasonable price/size trade-off and still use a distribution that's about 100MB (including Perl, named, node.js, openvpn, etc) so it can fit twice on the card (that's what makes upgrades easy).


Ask

[1] http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/nanobsd/