ARMposting

there ya go

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Can I join this ARMy of replies?

Iā€™ll see myself out nowā€¦

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Now that you came, you must stay until you own at least one ARM SBC

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I like the subject of this thread but Iā€™ve have nothing but disappointment from my experience with boards like RockPro64. Talking about shady hardware like the SATA card its sold by Pine, weird power and voltage shenanigans and most importantly lack of proper OS support.

It seems to me that there are only 2 kings in this arena: Raspberry Pis and the M1. Both supported by their respective ecosystems. The problem here is that Pis lack things I consider important like I/O (which can be solved by the CM and hundreds of third party offerings) and accelerated encryption while the M1 is just too expensive. I hope a Pi5 address the lack of hardware encryption.

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Are you referring to the SATA card, or the RockPro64 in general? I was actually eyeing some Rokchip SoMs for use at work, they seem cheap and pretty capable for the price.

Personally, Iā€™m quite sad NXP isnā€™t more popular in maker circles - theyā€™re amazing with their open documentation and first party BSPs, but the chips are kinda expensive for what a hobbyist would want. You only find industrial modules and SBCs with those chips, with starting prices which hobbyists just wonā€™t pay.

That said, Iā€™ve got a much different perspective - give me a Yocto BSP layer and Iā€™ll be happy. Heck, RockPro64 device tree is mainlined, between this and the U-Boot on Rockchipā€™s GitHub I could probably hack a BSP together.

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It seems devices are getting back in stock at least where I live in. My favorite local tinkering store has both RockPro64 4GB and Quartz64 8GB in stock.

Here we go again. The 8GB version of the Quartz64 screams ZFS but Iā€™m pretty sure software support is still very flaky.

The SATA card problems arenā€™t related to voltage. The ASMedia model they sell just doesnā€™t handle 2 devices attached and puts the controller into read mode.

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Ah. And what about the voltages? Badly designed board?

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I was referring to stuff like this that keeps happening in ARM SBC land:

Quartz64 Development - PINE64 (yeah its development but they are already selling it)

Confirmed Broken

  • USB 3.0 ā€” only works with very short cables and depends on the device. This is due to a hardware design issue relating to the coupling capacitors needed for SATA, which shares the same lines as USB 3.0.
    • Hardware design changes have been suggested to engineers, itā€™s in their hands now.
  • Module autoloading for the Ethernet PHY. The Motorcomm PHY does not have a vendor ID written into the appropriate hardware block, so there is no canonical way to identify the device.

As for voltages, often related to supplying rich featured boards coupled with underpowered power sources.

Pretty sure Pine sells a power supply for the RP64 that canā€™t actually handle a board attached to external disks and usb-3 devices.

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Thank you very much!

Those design issues hurt. If itā€™s their first device, I could understand time and budget limits or lack of engineering skill, but still. Ouch.

As for the power issues - youā€™d think manufacturers would learn. I donā€™t think I have seen an SBC which sells with a power supply which can actually handle all the stuff hobbyists like to plug into them.

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Finished Day 1 of daily driving linux (debian arm64) on the mac mini m1 today and it was decent, nothing too special but suprised to say my first time as using ARM as a linux device it worked fine, although since its a mac its got some odd issues, for e.g not being able to set my res higher than 1080p as no real GPU drivers/acceleration atm, but can still watch 1080p YT and discord chat with friends!

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@here - abusing the notification system. I already have my own entire thread posting about my ARM SBC adventures. Itā€™s been quite the headache, but learning a lot.


I really wonder how Trisquel is any different than Ubuntu. Trisquel is one of these interesting distros that may actually have a purpose other than trying to ephemerally improve Ubuntu by adding software on top, like nvidia driver option at install (before Ubuntu added those). I never took a close look at it, but I assume it removes snaps. I donā€™t know what else it takes away, other than proprietary software and blobs, I hope they do away with netplan and use ifupdown. I will give it to netplan though, itā€™s the only system that I know of which has the option to test a network config before applying it, which is very neat.

NanoPi R4S?

I know right? Itā€™s ridiculous how much support the Pis receive due to their popularity, when itā€™s probably among the worst hardware to work on. And I agree on the bootloaders, it took the Void devs a while to make an image for the Pi 4 (I have been watching the github page very closely), although it was more an issue of automating installs, standardizing some stuff and not borking existing installs, which they handled perfectly IMO.

I do use a Pi 4 as my main PC though, but I also think the lack of I/O and the fact that they are using Broadcom SoCs are pretty terrible drawbacks. I am interested in a Honeycomb LX2K and Iā€™ve been eyeing one for a year or 2 now, but I donā€™t really want more hardware that Iā€™m not going to use. I literally have a threadripper in a box.

I think they do deserve crap for selling SATA cards that are not even working properly on their own hardware. But with a bit of reading, that can be avoided, just buy a better SATA card.

Was the RockPro64 the one that had support for 15v bricks, but dropped that on a newer revision? Or am I imagining things?

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In other news, Khadas VIM4 is set to release on May 10.

Amlogic A311D2 single board computer with the Mali G52 MP8(8EE) GPU, 8GB LPDDR4X RAM, 32GB eMMC storage and HDMI input.

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Re: Honeycomb, I use NXP SoCs at work (although not Layerscape) and they are damn open for the market. Support is mostly mainlined, with only proprietary drivers being for third party IPs. That said, PowerVR has reached performance parity in the open driver over a year ago. Iirc Purismā€™s Librem phones use i.MX8 SoCs.

Personally, Iā€™m not going to main ARM anytime soon because it lacks the single thread performance I like to see in my hardware.

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I think Trisquel doesnā€™t use snaps, would assume not since the server is proprietary. Their whole schick it being FSF approved Free software. No blobs, proprietary software, all that. They also replace firefox and thunderbird with abrowser and icedove respectively, presumably due to Mozilla trademarks (Debian did that a while back). Also has a really nice MATE desktop, rather Windows 7-like. Apart from that, not too different.

Donā€™t know about netplan/ifupdown, never looked. Assuming it just uses the Ubuntu 20.04 default.

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I believe they replace FF and TB not because of trademark, these can be shipped with distros, but because they contain proprietary blobs, like widevine and other stuff. Also, not being GPL licensed might be an influence too, because everything on it has to be licensed under GPL from what I recall.

That would be sad.

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@ThatGuyB I mentioned the reverse engineered driver for GPUs in NXPā€™s i.MX8 SoCs, and now itā€™s getting an update.

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Khadas VIM 4 released yesterday

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I will probably be ordering a Khadas VIM4 from ameridroid once they get some in stock, Iā€™m pretty excited about it. I usually donā€™t order stuff when they first launch, but eh, what could go wrong, right? RIGHT?

But now Iā€™m having an issue, because I just discovered the Rockchip RK3588.

The SBC from Firefly above can have up to 32 GB of RAM, which is insaneā€¦ But apparently the Pine64 QuartzPro64 will maybe ship with 16 GB of RAM. The development kit already does.

The jump in performance from the Raspberry Pi 4 is massive and I could use that additional juice. Especially on the GPU, because muh 3D acceleration. And I can always repurpose my Pi to run Android or something and remote into it when needed, or make it part of my (planned) LXD cluster.

The difference in performance between the Khadas VIM4 and the Pine64 QuartzPro64 may not be that big, but I think I will prefer Amlogic over Rockchip. Additionally, the VIM4 will likely get a head start on its distro development and get stuff patched up before the official QuartzPro64 even launches. So itā€™s either a wait for more RAM, or a rush for a potentially faster-to-reach-stable system. Given that I donā€™t currently feel the need for more than 8 GB of RAM on my Pi 4, it should be fine. The addition of native m.2 will also be good regardless of the board.

In 1 or 2 years, the Honeycomb LX2K may even become obsolete. Which is a good thing, because we could get better performance in a smaller form factor. The 16 cores will still make the LX2K a good choice if you can use all the cores, maybe a virtualization workstation.

For now, itā€™s just 4x Cortex A55 + 4x Cortex A76 vs 16x Cortex A72 cores, with pretty comparable clock speeds, maybe the A76 having higher core clock, but with better single threaded performance. But the LX2K will still have the better OS support, because itā€™s been available for much longer, and it has UEFI.

The ARM world is looking pretty exciting nonetheless.

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The LX2K is, first and foremost, firewall or router hardware - thatā€™s what the SoC was designed for, you can easily see that by the sheer amount of networking it offers.

For personal use, you will probably want something with more single threaded performance, to handle those heavy websites (hello Reddit). I canā€™t find any sort of hard data on the amount of cache in that Amlogic SoC, but if itā€™s reasonable, for single core tasks that A311D2 is probably a beast compared to LX2160A.

Of interest is that NPU in Amlogic - if it actually has PyTorch or similar support, you can run some inference on it, or expect to speed up scientific computation if you code that kind of stuff.

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