I bought an ODROID a while back, great specs. Dang thing wouldn’t boot (something in the post-bootstrap process, as near as I could tell), and the only support channel was through the forum; docs were in the form of a single magazine-styled PDF. I spent a bit with that, then decided I didn’t really want to be playing embedded engineer via debugging a board and probing physical connections and gave it & all my raspberry pis away.
Recently I found out that official Fedora releases >= 28 just works on the Raspberry Pi 3B+ I got. Both in 32 bit (armhf) and 64 bit (aarch64). This is so great! No need to fiddle with anything, just install and go! It is a bit slow at times due to the crappy SD-card, but well :-)
They certainly have their own style of booting, not sure if this applies to all of their arm boards but you would dd a u-boot image to a specific offset on your SD card and off you go.
Interesting. I wish they had released a complete technical readout in their docs.
I decided that as I was using the SBC systems to be low-key servers, I’d just boot up nodes in the cloud - spending hours debugging finicky proprietary-design systems was not a good use of my spare time. Then I went off and wrote some code and felt good.
This looks interesting. Of course it’s a shame it’s based on Intel, but:
PCI-e
SATA
2 x gigabit ethernet
x86
VT-x + VT-d
32 GB ram
4 okay-ish cores
At first glance this looks like the first SBC that actually will be usable for stuff like routers, virtualization host/hypervisor (in a cluster for example) or a simple linux desktop stuck to the back of a monitor. Price will be important though, since you also need to get memory while a lot of other SBC’s have memory on the PCB.
The fact that its based on Intel is, imho, a good thing .. I’ve got a drawer full of SBC’s that started out with lots of promise - ultimate power, great battery life, etc - but are sitting there unused because the vendors failed to keep the kernel promises.
That’ll be less likely to happen with an Intel-based SBC, imho.
Which ARM SoCs do you have that are supported on mainline? I’ve had nothing but all kinds of issues with ARM. I tried using an overpriced SolidRun as a router and ran into nothing but issues and terrible support.
I wrote another post on seeing these issues in Android devices. ARM is not a platform. It’s just random shit soldered to random pins. At least Microsoft phones had ARM + UEFI. I mean we have device tress, but they’re usually broken to hell too and most phone vendors don’t use them.
Is the particular device in this post a 3rd party x86 clone? Is it free of Management Engine or other 3rd party controllers? I realize all x86 stuff has non-free binary blobs everywhere, where as you can get a lot of totally free ARM chips/boards, but long term support is often an issue. With x86+UEFI or even classic BIOS, you can run mainline Linux on them for years to come. There are even forks of Linux for older unsupported 386 chips if you really want to buy a ton of old 386 stock and use them in embedded applications. ARM is a clusterfuck by comparison.
Rockchip RK3399/RK3328, Allwinner H3/H5/A64, Nvidia Tegra X1, the Broadcom junk that’s in the RPi…
I run FreeBSD (actually I worked on RK3399 support), so there’s no non-mainline :) but for Linux, Rockchip is actually mainlining their official drivers, and for Allwinner it’s the community.
Of course the cheap embedded boards aren’t as good as the high end server stuff (ThunderX/2/Centriq/eMAG/…), but there is a lot of support.
OLIMEX has some interesting hardware and according to SUNXI Buying guide “Currently, Olimex is the only company creating Allwinner based OSHW, and Olimex actively contributes to the sunxi project.”.
For some cheaper but less open options(I use an orange pi zero as a home media server/nas/cups/whatever) armbian provides quite decent support.
I bought the original PINE64 and found the is support to be pretty terrible, even today it feels like it’s all been hacked together by guests in China rather than the manufacturer doing much about it.
For Linux, just don’t go to the vendor, ever. Check Arch Linux ARM and Armbian. (Apparently Ethernet support was merged into mainline as late as 4.15, but it’s there now)
I think the parent was implying AMD would have less microcode updates and more trustworthiness due to better QA than Intel. Likely inspired by Meltdown/Spectre vulnerabilities. Also, AMD has been in the low-power, SoC game for some time. I don’t know if you’ll get lots of problems out of them that you wouldn’t out of Intel. It would surprise me a bit. I remember Soekris was using AMD Geodes.
Oh shit:
“Due to declining sales, limited resources available to design new products, and increased competition from Asia, Soekris Engineering, Inc. has suspended operations in the USA as of today.”
Glanced at their page to see product updates. Got sadder news than I was looking for.
I don’t know much about the Soekris boards, but pcengines.ch sells surprisingly affordable AMD Jaguar-based boards for embedded and network applications. I’m using one for my OPNSense firewall and have been perfectly happy with it.
From corebooting my ALIX2C3 I recalll the geode microcode has another issue in that it’s reliant on legacy tooling to build so you are encouraged to just use the blob (tooling is either DOS based or related to visual studio, can’t recall).
If I remember properly HardKernel had everything for their C2 platform mainlined so you could use modern kernels without having to use a vendor specific one.
it’s a shame it’s based on Intel […] Price will be important though
I too immediately thought “why not Ryzen?” but, price is actually the reason they went with Intel, according to the blog post that’s linked here. Excerpt:
2017 December,
We considered AMD Ryzen 5 2500U 3.5Ghz mobile processor. The performance was very impressive, but the price of the CPU was also very impressive.
Fortunately, Intel also announced the Gemini Lake processors. It was slower than Ryzen but much faster than Intel Apollo Lake, and the price was reasonable.
Looks like the board will be considerably cheaper due to the Intel chip.
I bought an ODROID a while back, great specs. Dang thing wouldn’t boot (something in the post-bootstrap process, as near as I could tell), and the only support channel was through the forum; docs were in the form of a single magazine-styled PDF. I spent a bit with that, then decided I didn’t really want to be playing embedded engineer via debugging a board and probing physical connections and gave it & all my raspberry pis away.
Recently I found out that official Fedora releases >= 28 just works on the Raspberry Pi 3B+ I got. Both in 32 bit (armhf) and 64 bit (aarch64). This is so great! No need to fiddle with anything, just install and go! It is a bit slow at times due to the crappy SD-card, but well :-)
Update: I use the minimal install without desktop. GNOME 3 does not really work.
The 3+ will boot directly from USB, you’ll do much better with a USB SSD instead if you’re actually using a Pi for desktop-style use cases.
(you can also put a tiny bootloader on an sd card for the older Pis & achieve the same goal, but the 3+ dispenses with that altogether.)
They certainly have their own style of booting, not sure if this applies to all of their arm boards but you would dd a u-boot image to a specific offset on your SD card and off you go.
Interesting. I wish they had released a complete technical readout in their docs.
I decided that as I was using the SBC systems to be low-key servers, I’d just boot up nodes in the cloud - spending hours debugging finicky proprietary-design systems was not a good use of my spare time. Then I went off and wrote some code and felt good.
For one I welcome a cost effective x86 platform with dual NICs. Hoping that lots of people get these and run pf/open{sense} and vyos on them.
The APU2/3?
This looks interesting. Of course it’s a shame it’s based on Intel, but:
At first glance this looks like the first SBC that actually will be usable for stuff like routers, virtualization host/hypervisor (in a cluster for example) or a simple linux desktop stuck to the back of a monitor. Price will be important though, since you also need to get memory while a lot of other SBC’s have memory on the PCB.
The fact that its based on Intel is, imho, a good thing .. I’ve got a drawer full of SBC’s that started out with lots of promise - ultimate power, great battery life, etc - but are sitting there unused because the vendors failed to keep the kernel promises.
That’ll be less likely to happen with an Intel-based SBC, imho.
Most ARM SoCs are decently supported by mainline operating systems. Which boards do you have and what would you like to use them for?
Which ARM SoCs do you have that are supported on mainline? I’ve had nothing but all kinds of issues with ARM. I tried using an overpriced SolidRun as a router and ran into nothing but issues and terrible support.
I wrote another post on seeing these issues in Android devices. ARM is not a platform. It’s just random shit soldered to random pins. At least Microsoft phones had ARM + UEFI. I mean we have device tress, but they’re usually broken to hell too and most phone vendors don’t use them.
Is the particular device in this post a 3rd party x86 clone? Is it free of Management Engine or other 3rd party controllers? I realize all x86 stuff has non-free binary blobs everywhere, where as you can get a lot of totally free ARM chips/boards, but long term support is often an issue. With x86+UEFI or even classic BIOS, you can run mainline Linux on them for years to come. There are even forks of Linux for older unsupported 386 chips if you really want to buy a ton of old 386 stock and use them in embedded applications. ARM is a clusterfuck by comparison.
Rockchip RK3399/RK3328, Allwinner H3/H5/A64, Nvidia Tegra X1, the Broadcom junk that’s in the RPi…
I run FreeBSD (actually I worked on RK3399 support), so there’s no non-mainline :) but for Linux, Rockchip is actually mainlining their official drivers, and for Allwinner it’s the community.
Of course the cheap embedded boards aren’t as good as the high end server stuff (ThunderX/2/Centriq/eMAG/…), but there is a lot of support.
OLIMEX has some interesting hardware and according to SUNXI Buying guide “Currently, Olimex is the only company creating Allwinner based OSHW, and Olimex actively contributes to the sunxi project.”.
For some cheaper but less open options(I use an orange pi zero as a home media server/nas/cups/whatever) armbian provides quite decent support.
I bought the original PINE64 and found the is support to be pretty terrible, even today it feels like it’s all been hacked together by guests in China rather than the manufacturer doing much about it.
It’s very well supported in FreeBSD.
For Linux, just don’t go to the vendor, ever. Check Arch Linux ARM and Armbian. (Apparently Ethernet support was merged into mainline as late as 4.15, but it’s there now)
I think the parent was implying AMD would have less microcode updates and more trustworthiness due to better QA than Intel. Likely inspired by Meltdown/Spectre vulnerabilities. Also, AMD has been in the low-power, SoC game for some time. I don’t know if you’ll get lots of problems out of them that you wouldn’t out of Intel. It would surprise me a bit. I remember Soekris was using AMD Geodes.
Oh shit:
“Due to declining sales, limited resources available to design new products, and increased competition from Asia, Soekris Engineering, Inc. has suspended operations in the USA as of today.”
Glanced at their page to see product updates. Got sadder news than I was looking for.
I don’t know much about the Soekris boards, but pcengines.ch sells surprisingly affordable AMD Jaguar-based boards for embedded and network applications. I’m using one for my OPNSense firewall and have been perfectly happy with it.
Thanks for the tip!
From corebooting my ALIX2C3 I recalll the geode microcode has another issue in that it’s reliant on legacy tooling to build so you are encouraged to just use the blob (tooling is either DOS based or related to visual studio, can’t recall).
If I remember properly HardKernel had everything for their C2 platform mainlined so you could use modern kernels without having to use a vendor specific one.
I too immediately thought “why not Ryzen?” but, price is actually the reason they went with Intel, according to the blog post that’s linked here. Excerpt:
Looks like the board will be considerably cheaper due to the Intel chip.
Pricing still TBD, article says:
Is that good value for just this board w/ CPU?
Eh. This ASRock board with the same CPU is $86 on newegg.
The only other board I can find is this one from GIGABYTE b2b, which seems to be more industrial focused, for $169 at sg-computers.com.
Major differences: