4 ms·

ARM SBCs often only work with a few "approved" distributions (downloaded from the SBC vendor) because the kernel patches required for it to boot aren't in mainl

by snazz 6y ago

ARM SBCs often only work with a few "approved" distributions (downloaded from the SBC vendor) because the kernel patches required for it to boot aren't in mainline Linux.

hardwaresofton 6y ago
There are a lot of distributions (and pieces of software) that care about compiling on ARM/other architectures thanks to various disparate things that exist -- raspberry pi's popularity, go/rust/and friends making cross compiling easier, etc. I've had a good experience with ODROID U2 (I personally think ODROID is my favorite SBC producer, so I'm biased, but most have some debian-based or similar distro that you can run and be productive things with. In the more concrete world, both ZFS and Ceph (Bluestore has checksuming now) run on ARM as far as I can tell: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Project%20and%20Community/FAQ.html#supported-architectures https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Project%20and%20Commu... https://developer.arm.com/solutions/infrastructure/developer-resources/workloads/ceph https://developer.arm.com/solutions/infrastructure/developer... Releasing a board meant for NASes that you can't run either of those on seems pretty short sighted for a company that's definitely not new to the SBC game.
- progval 6y ago
  Note that Ceph only supports 64-bits ARM, not 32-bits ARM. They removed binaries for the latter from their website, and the armhf port in Debian has a critical bug if you have non-armhf hosts in your cluster. https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=961481 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=961481 Fortunately the Odroid HC4 is 64-bits, unlike its predecessors (HC1 and HC2).
rektide 6y ago
There was a question asking after upstream support for the Odroid N2+, currently easily the fastest most powerful Single Board Computer (SBC) under $100 (starts at $63). I had a pretty robust answer then[1] with lots of details. The short answer is: the Amlogic chip's ARM "Bifrost" GPU is still basically unusable, because ARM has a huge problem upstreaming anything, but that could maybe change some day. But the rest of the platform is what I would classify as "fantastically well supported", and will run excellently with a mainline kernel (and also with fantastic uboot support)[2]. We're still some time away from boot-systems being standardized, so uboot is "the" way to go pretty much now, which targets embedded systems, but eventually we all hope the Server Based Boot Requirements[3]- which mandate ACPI and UEFI support- will become semi-standard, such that we can use better secured & more capable standardized bootloaders. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24813526 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24813526 [2] http://linux-meson.com/doku.php#kernel_mainlining_progress http://linux-meson.com/doku.php#kernel_mainlining_progress [3] https://community.arm.com/iot/b/internet-of-things/posts/arm-server-standards-part-2-sbbr-specification-released https://community.arm.com/iot/b/internet-of-things/posts/arm...

by snazz 6y ago

ARM SBCs often only work with a few "approved" distributions (downloaded from the SBC vendor) because the kernel patches required for it to boot aren't in mainline Linux.

hardwaresofton 6y ago

There are a lot of distributions (and pieces of software) that care about compiling on ARM/other architectures thanks to various disparate things that exist -- raspberry pi's popularity, go/rust/and friends making cross compiling easier, etc. I've had a good experience with ODROID U2 (I personally think ODROID is my favorite SBC producer, so I'm biased, but most have some debian-based or similar distro that you can run and be productive things with. In the more concrete world, both ZFS and Ceph (Bluestore has checksuming now) run on ARM as far as I can tell: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Project%20and%20Community/FAQ.html#supported-architectures https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Project%20and%20Commu... https://developer.arm.com/solutions/infrastructure/developer-resources/workloads/ceph https://developer.arm.com/solutions/infrastructure/developer... Releasing a board meant for NASes that you can't run either of those on seems pretty short sighted for a company that's definitely not new to the SBC game.

progval 6y ago
Note that Ceph only supports 64-bits ARM, not 32-bits ARM. They removed binaries for the latter from their website, and the armhf port in Debian has a critical bug if you have non-armhf hosts in your cluster. https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=961481 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=961481 Fortunately the Odroid HC4 is 64-bits, unlike its predecessors (HC1 and HC2).

rektide 6y ago

There was a question asking after upstream support for the Odroid N2+, currently easily the fastest most powerful Single Board Computer (SBC) under $100 (starts at $63). I had a pretty robust answer then[1] with lots of details. The short answer is: the Amlogic chip's ARM "Bifrost" GPU is still basically unusable, because ARM has a huge problem upstreaming anything, but that could maybe change some day. But the rest of the platform is what I would classify as "fantastically well supported", and will run excellently with a mainline kernel (and also with fantastic uboot support)[2]. We're still some time away from boot-systems being standardized, so uboot is "the" way to go pretty much now, which targets embedded systems, but eventually we all hope the Server Based Boot Requirements[3]- which mandate ACPI and UEFI support- will become semi-standard, such that we can use better secured & more capable standardized bootloaders. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24813526 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24813526 [2] http://linux-meson.com/doku.php#kernel_mainlining_progress http://linux-meson.com/doku.php#kernel_mainlining_progress [3] https://community.arm.com/iot/b/internet-of-things/posts/arm-server-standards-part-2-sbbr-specification-released https://community.arm.com/iot/b/internet-of-things/posts/arm...