6 ms·

My usual question for small cheap boards is: what will happen to OS support in 3 years? Is it using regular distro or is this a custom fork which will likely be

• CoastalCoder 3y ago
  I've never done a project using a board like this, so out of ignorance: Does LTS support usually matter, if you're using the device for a stand-alone application such as a lighting controller or front-door camera?
  • idiotsecant 3y ago
    depends on whether you care about vulnerabilities or not, I suppose. Presumably that lighting controller talks to something. If it talks to a local network only and it's impossible for external traffic to reach it, maybe not such a big deal. If that's not true it might be significant. That's also true of all IoT junk anyhow, it's all running some linux variant under the hood and security / updating is rarely a major concern.
    • CoastalCoder 3y ago
      That's what I was thinking. I was assuming that e.g. the lighting controller would only have 3 modes of access enabled: (1) USB commections (2) wired ethernet during admin (3) ZWave via a USB adapter
      • yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        This is actually one of the reasons I like bluetooth/zigbee/z-wave/IR/etc. so much - it puts a significant barrier to attacking devices even if they don't get patches. Of course, you still should pay attention to security and update them if possible because local and/or proxied attacks are still a thing, but it's much less likely to get hit.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• snarfy 3y ago
  Why does it need continuous, perpetual support? Most devices like this get built, software installed, and never updated again. When is the last time you updated the ECU software in your car? I built a small arcade cabinet using an old raspberry pi 2b. Once I built it I've never needed to upgrade anything on it. It works fine and plays all the old games. I have backups of the SD card in case anything craps out.
  • dotnet00 3y ago
    If it can connect to the internet, it will need security updates.
    • kyberias 3y ago
      Why would a connection to internet need security updates?
      • gizmo686 3y ago
        Because as an industry, we are bad at our jobs. The network facing software has critical security vulnerabilities. Even security folks accept that as the way of the world. At the point the software is released it has (hopefully) no known security vulnerabilities, which is a reasonably secure situation to be in. However, eventually some of them will become known, and that is not safe.
        • VyseofArcadia 3y ago
          But a "critical security vulnerability " depends on the use. My daily driver? Yes, I want all of the security updates. A raspberry pi for playing arcade games that I occasionally scp a ROM over to? I really don't care if someone hacks in. We, as an industry, are bad about pushing "every device that is on the internet needs to be as up to date as possible all the time" when it reality there is a lot of unimportant stuff on the internet. It's like locks. I wouldn't secure my house with a bike lock, but it's fine for my bike. My bike is less full of important stuff.
• oneplane 3y ago
  It's dead on arrival; currently runs Debian 10 with custom patches and binary blobs. It's an RK3308 so not entirely impossible to run on a normal distro, but you'd have to bring your own firmware and device tree etc.
  • anigbrowl 3y ago
    This is designed as an embeddable component for learning, prototyping, and OEMs. A lot of people here are just sniffily dismissing it as 'DOA' when what they mean is 'I would not want to maintain this.'
    • oneplane 3y ago
      No, it's DOA. Embeddable components need support too. As do OEMs and prototyping scenarios. It is presented as a viable commercial product, but it actually is an old SoC with no ecosystem. If anything, it teaches people not to use this type of thing. The only way it would not be e-waste is if it had a future, and it doesn't and that's why it's bad. At this price point there are so many community and commercial alternatives that do have an ecosystem and support it's just pointless and most likely an attempt to dump overstocked Rockchip parts. Even an ancient i.MX 6 is a better choice.
    • ilyt 3y ago
      Dude, Debian 10 goes out of support in a year. Debian 12 already released. It's 4 years out of date at release, why would you want that for "learning and prototyping", let alone start a OEM device with soon unsupported software versions.
    • epcoa 3y ago
      > 'I would not want to maintain this.' Who the fuck would though? If there’s any value an SBC vendor should be providing it is some amount of support for a reasonable length of time. There’s a reason the RPi is sold the way it is.
• squarefoot 3y ago
  In my opinion the vendor supplied OS distros are to be taken as just a starting point, nothing to rely on more than the time needed for the port of one of the well established distros (Armbian, DietPI, stock, etc) to appear for a given board, which often happens quite fast when driver blobs and lack of documentation don't get in the way (the RK3308 used here is well supported along the WiFi chip). My usual approach when looking for a board is to check first if there's some support from the above distros, or wait. It may seem odd, but it's just the same reasoning we're used to in the PC world translated to the embedded world: whoever would expect Gigabyte, Asus, etc. to create and supply the Linux distribution that runs on their PC mainboard?
• reaperducer 3y ago
  If you want to play with it for a while then put it away forever, go ahead and do it; but if you want to build something long-term, better find a different board. I think it depends on what you want to do with it. If you're building something that won't access the network, or will be isolated to the LAN, then it's fine. Not everything needs or wants to be connected to the internet.
• thanatos519 3y ago
  It's not just small cheap boards. It's small expensive computers, too: I was burned just like this with the Sony VAIO 720P and the PlanetComputers Gemini PDA. Awesome hardware, pretty good drivers for the current kernel/distro, and then ... nothing.
• rostakagmfun 3y ago
  Slightly unrelated, but I wonder what is a preferred OS for similar boards: a buildroot or yocto -based system vs a full-blown Debian-based distribution with desktop and package managers? When I looked into (now deprecated) Jetson Nano I was surprised to find out there was no straightforward and documented way to build your own system and cross-compile for it. Is that because for many people using SBCs means doing everything on the target (e.g. compiling software), or am I missing something?
  • Eisenstein 3y ago
    Armbian or DietPi.
  • throwaway173738 3y ago
    I just get the kernel and grab the stock Debian userspace for the architecture. Vendors like to do horrible stuff to their sample distros. I’ve also tried Yocto and Buildroot and frankly they’re not that great. Yocto’s build system is so complicated it could take months to fit all your custom layers together to get a working image. Every vendor of every layer has their own conventions and you have to manage patch sets on top of patch sets to get some things working. Buildroot works better but still has a rigid vision for what an embedded Linux system looks like and how it fits together. The beauty of Linux is that once you get to libc the interface is identical no matter what board you’re using so there’s no reason to build everything from source. And if you want something like Yocto you’d be better off building rpm or deb packages from a basic layer and then using eg multistrap to build a root filesystem.