[floatboth]

That's odd. Are you using HDMI or the serial console?

My Raspberry Pi 2 runs FreeBSD very well. Currently running OpenNTPD + Monit + Postgres + Node-RED + go-carbon + graphite-api + Grafana + Syncthing + Transmission — all of this with only 249 MB of RAM used. FreeBSD's memory management is excellent.

RPi 3 (native AArch64 mode) support is in progress https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm64/rpi3 for now it runs only on one CPU core, SMP is "actively being worked on".

[eth0up]

>Are you using HDMI

I was using HDMI. As mentioned, I've since returned to Raspbian, where I continue to use HDMI and all works generally well. I was initially thrilled after installing FreeBSD, but for whatever reason, things changed. I remember compiling vim for a whole day before cancelling it. I could type an entire sentence or paragraph before any input would show. Bad luck perhaps. My primary use for the Pi is a surveillance camera, so I temporarily abandoned BSD for what I know works. I intend to make my next main system a BSD system. Presently I am running Debian Testing, which has been quite excellent, but as also mentioned, I am bothered by Systemd and aspire to be free of it.

[floatboth]

HDMI works fine for me, it's really, really weird that it didn't for you.

Compiling anything on ARM is horribly slow, cross-compiling from amd64 is a much better idea.

But you don't need to compile vim, there are binary packages for ARM! http://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:12:armv6/latest/ pkg should just work.

[eth0up]

Pardon my ignorance; but what would HDMI have to do with the issues I've noted? In Raspbian, the Pi is a champion, minus some USB issues. Why would HDMI be any different in BSD? Why would HDMI cause lag or infinite compiling? Also, thanks for your replies. Amidst the onslaught of downvotes, I nearly committed YC-Seppuku in shame. Also-also, with a bit of irony, after I'd expressed my satisfaction with Debian Testing (after two happy years), this very night "apt-get dist-upgrade" wanted to remove everything "X", e.g. xorg, xserver, etc., and iptables too. These are the less pleasant moments of Testing. Pretty much annihilated my laptop, removing synaptic input drivers and every other useful thing it could sabotage. Nothing single-user mode can't surmount, but man, what timing. Happens about once/twice per year.

[contras1970]

i can imagine building everything from sources must be painful on such a puny machine. why didn't you use binary packages? pkg install vim ?

[eth0up]

All I knew of were ports. However, as noted above, there was the issue of input delay, which was very discouraging. Maybe I will try pkg next time.