A few small, dull points: The Pi family of SBCs is not a collection of obscure devices. They are becoming the second most common ARM platform in the world. Almost like the i386 when BSD was ported to it. True, docs were available for the i386 (which is a mistake I'm sure IBM regrets to this day) but not for the Pi. Probably never will be. Manufacturers know better now. Both, by standards of the time, were considered "crappy". But, population matters as an indicator of evolutionary survival potential. Rarity invites extinction. More to the point, nobody can try open source on hardware they don't have. Very few will purchase obscure devices (for cash money) to try out even free software that's uncertain to work. They'll try the free software that might work on the hardware they have. Overwhelmingly that's some flavor of Linux, many of which are quite good. If the first thing tried fails miserably then FreeBSD might get a look, but that's fishing in a drying pond. In a thread entitled "how to get freebsd on a new board?" it's suggested that a port of FreeBSD to a new platform would cost $20-50K, presumably with manufacturer support. Let's suppose it'll cost $100K if the manufacturer won't help. There are, or soon will be, twenty _million_ Raspberry Pi computers floating about. Raspbian on the Pi works well, but it's closed for practial purposes. Is there enough interest to scrounge up the ante? I've put a little in the pot and hope it helps. The donations page at https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/ makes it simple to add one's two cents' worth, hopefully more. It may not be widely appreciated, but FreeBSD owes its very existence to explicit government support, implicit academic support and probably quite a lot of unwitting support from industry. All three have largely vanished. No supervisor, academic or enterprise, is able to defend time spent on work not tied to measurable needs in the existing business climate. No supervisor can claim ignorance given modern productivity monitoring tools available in programming departments. When I started following 386BSD, precursor to FreeBSD, almost all of the Usenet traffic came from academic and enterprise folks. The Net/2 tapes were made public via a US Government project at UC Berkeley. I do not know who paid for the machine time and labor of doing the early cross-compile from a Dec mini to an i386, perhaps someone closer to the process will chime in. The 386BSD Patchkit was put together by a mix of academic and business IT people. My guess is that the academic supervisors didn't mind and the business supervisors didn't know. Now both would likely be accused of dereliction by _their_ bosses. In sum, FreeBSD in the past relied on a kind of support that has vanished. Those of us who whould like to see the project prosper (survive?) in directions that don't have the support of large sponsors will have to pick up the slack. For me, that means contributing modest amounts of money. From others, skills are more valuable. With enough contributors progress is possible. Not certain, merely possible. It's easy to understand not wanting to work on platforms that aren't fun, I'm the same way. Useful and necessary things are often not fun, and folks get compensated to do them. I selected BSD over Minix and Linux nearly thirty years ago. BSD had a a well-established, good reputation, the development model was easy to understand and it could be tried for free on already-in-hand hardware. All are still true, but the hardware underneath is shifting. Manufacturers won't repeat the mistake of IBM in releasing full docs, lest they lose control of the platform and software ecosystems. I'm not sure it's possible for open source to retain its independence, but I hope FreeBSD will try. Having played around with self-hosting on the Pi for nearly four years the CLI side of things, needed for a server, appears to be ready for Tier-1 or close to it. GUI features are vastly more frustrating. Xorg works but browsers are hard to compile and run very slowly. Maybe Tier-1 for CLI alone would be a useful intermediate step. There's much complaint about lack of documentation. It's old, but at least some does exist: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bcm2835/README.md https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bcm2835/BCM2835-ARM-Peripherals.pdf errata at: https://elinux.org/BCM2835_datasheet_errata https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bcm2836/QA7_rev3.4.pdf GUI support appears to hinge on VideoCore. Some docs are at https://docs.broadcom.com/docs-and-downloads/docs/support/videocore/VideoCoreIV-AG100-R.pdf but it's been around a while with little progress. Maybe it's incomplete or stale, surely it's hard to read 8-) Either way, graphics progress seems a long way off. Thanks for reading this far, bob prohaska 20200228