On Wed, 10 Dec 2025 14:31:19 +0000 void <[email protected]> wrote: > In essence, it's not *just* speed of reads/writes. It's how busy the machine > is. > Although, on paper, usb2 should have been sufficient, it wasn't. Offloading > reads and writes to nfs client meant I could (for example) buildworld on a > pi2 with -j2 and still have interactive access, 5x ssh sessions, and top > running.
I don't have much experience with that particular hardware. I only have access to Raspberry Pis 3 and 4. With Pi 3 in particular, USB and Ethernet port share the bandwidth/bus, so you don't really gain anything. Which is why Pi 3 advertises 1 GbE but the real throughput is much lower. This is nothing to do with NetBSD or NFS, it's a hardware design limitation. There is also no real performance advantage on Pi 3 to use USB2 storage, so I run NetBSD on a microSD card. Pi 4 is different and I think has a dedicated Ethernet MAC. NetBSD runs quite well on both of them. I recommend you upgrade to Pi 4 and USB3 SSD drive. It scales much better for build from sources workloads. See my articles on how to install the bootloader and the base system: https://cryintothebluesky.blogspot.com/2025/11/installing-netbsd-10-on-raspberry-pi-3.html https://cryintothebluesky.blogspot.com/2025/12/installing-netbsd-10-on-raspberry-pi-4.html
