If the application fits, choosing one of the BSDs with the more popular chip families can work well. In other words, if the BSD crowd likes an SoC, you'll get a good, stable system running with good kernel support. In my case it's the RockChip family, specifically from PINE64.
Examples:
- PINE64 Rock64 running FreeBSD 14.1 replaced an aging RPi3. I use this for SDR applications. It's a small, low power device with PoE that I can deploy close to my outdoor antennas (e.g. 1090mhz for dump1090-fa ADS-B). It's been really solid with its eMMC, and FreeBSD has good USB support for RTL-SDR devices.
- PINE64 RockPro64 running NetBSD 10. I have a PCIe card with a 500gb SSD M.2 slot. NetBSD has ZFS support and it has been stable. This lets me take snapshots on the SSD zpool. I generate time-lapse videos using the faster cores.
You don't get 100% HW support (e.g. no camera support for RockPro64) but I don't need it. The compromise is worth it in my case because I get a stable and consistent system that I'm familiar with: BSD.
Examples:
- PINE64 Rock64 running FreeBSD 14.1 replaced an aging RPi3. I use this for SDR applications. It's a small, low power device with PoE that I can deploy close to my outdoor antennas (e.g. 1090mhz for dump1090-fa ADS-B). It's been really solid with its eMMC, and FreeBSD has good USB support for RTL-SDR devices.
- PINE64 RockPro64 running NetBSD 10. I have a PCIe card with a 500gb SSD M.2 slot. NetBSD has ZFS support and it has been stable. This lets me take snapshots on the SSD zpool. I generate time-lapse videos using the faster cores.
You don't get 100% HW support (e.g. no camera support for RockPro64) but I don't need it. The compromise is worth it in my case because I get a stable and consistent system that I'm familiar with: BSD.