[nycbug-talk] NetBSD on ARM

[Andy Kosela]

On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 3:38 PM, Justin Dearing <zippy1981 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 8:56 AM, George Rosamond
> <george at ceetonetechnology.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> There's so much activity around ARM. . . we need to have a meeting on
>> porting to it.  Anyone?
>>
>
> The question is, whats the motivation to port FreeBSD to ARM?
>
> Not that I think its a bad idea, but wheres the market for products using
> FreeBSD on arm? Is someone going to sell netbooks running PC-BSD? Is a
> hosting provider going to get a few racks of ARM blades for a cloud. Is some
> university researcher/hacker going to port it just because?

Ask them:
 http://www.semihalf.com

They have been porting FreeBSD to ARM for years.  The embedded market
is blossoming right now -- as a whole it's much more bigger than
server and desktop markets combined, ranging from simple commodity
appliances to military and spacecraft technologies.  FreeBSD like
NetBSD before can very well run in those environments, although I
think it will be hard to compete there with specialized RTOS systems
like VxWorks or QNX.

--Andy