NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4

Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4 by krautburglar on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @11:09AM (#50442328)

I think the biggest problem with many of the non-Linux open source kernels these days is high idle CPU consumption — on both real hardware, and under virtualization.

Did latest OpenBSD & Haiku recently under KVM. Idle OBSD was using around 20% CPU to do nothing. Haiku, 30%. And it’s not just a virtualization thing. Thinkpad battery test yielded similar results.

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Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4 by HeckFeck on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @11:41AM (#50442790)

That's the blocker for me too. I'd love to roll NetBSD, OpenBSD or Haiku.. but how well does it work with hardware, energy consumption and resource management? It's really just the mainstream OSes or nothing, sadly.

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Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4 by krautburglar on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @02:48PM (#50445372)

Despite the high idle, Haiku was really impressive. Had all of my staples (vim, tmux, git, ssh), recent versions, in their package manager, and it worked beautifully. Stable, rapid booting, responsive.

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