Personal ARM Server running Gentoo - Hardware Suggestions:

nelsonwcf · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 31 Oct 2012 Posts: 112

Hi everybody,

I was researching for some low cost server that could run Gentoo at home and had the epiphany of having an ARM server instead of Intel one. Cheaper, fanless and small. However, there are many options in the market now (Raspberry/Banana/Orange PI, Cubieboard, etc.) and for many of them available information is less than ideal, so I decided to come here to ask for advice. I intend to use the hardware as a DLNA Media server, file server and possibly a mail server for my domain. Maybe an OpenSSL for tunneling as well. Gentoo/Portage compatible is a prerequisite, obviously.

What board do you recommend me to get?

Thank you,
Nelson

szatox · Advocate Joined: 27 Aug 2013 Posts: 3477

chithanh · Posted: Mon Apr 11, 2016 9:47 pm Post subject:

You can look here for boards that are confirmed to work
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Category:Embedded_systems
But it should be possible to run Gentoo on any board if there is another working Linux distro. But you may have to figure out some things yourself when there is no wiki article yet.

I suggest that you get a board with (native) SATA port and Gigabit Ethernet for your media server, like Orange Pi (not plus/PC/2/...), A20-OLinuXino, Cubox i4Pro, or Banana Pi.

As media server this is probably less important, but among those listed here, only the Cubox has free graphics drivers (etnaviv).

Cyker · Veteran Joined: 15 Jun 2006 Posts: 1746

Thing worth knowing: Almost everything runs over the USB bus on the RPi and will bottleneck horribly under high I/O load.

nelsonwcf · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 31 Oct 2012 Posts: 112

Fantastic, guys. Thank you so much.

Irre · Guru Joined: 09 Nov 2013 Posts: 434 Location: Stockholm

Odroid C2 is really the most promising ARM machine.

I will buy one as soon as possibly and eventually replace my slow gen 1 Raspberry PI:s

Roman_Gruber · Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2016 11:59 am Post subject:

you better look into those mainboards with onboard cpus, like amd apus, or intel atom

e.g.: ASRock C70M1 (90-MXGTM0-A0UAYZ)

http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/C70M1/

35 euros in my area

chithanh · Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2016 12:10 pm Post subject:

I would avoid Amlogic based boards like the ODROID C1 and C2 at the moment. You will be stuck with old kernels. ODROID C1 is still at kernel 3.10.
There is an effort to mainline Amlogic code, linux-meson, which is kind of a poor man's sunxi. Until something usable comes out of that, better go with other SoCs.

Irre · Guru Joined: 09 Nov 2013 Posts: 434 Location: Stockholm

Things happen fast now. Image with kernel 3.14.y is already there. http://www.armbian.com/odroid-c2/

C5ace · Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2016 12:57 pm Post subject:

chithanh · Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2016 1:41 pm Post subject:

nelsonwcf · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 31 Oct 2012 Posts: 112

I opted for the BPi. I'm new in ARM architecture so I wanted something cheap to try out. I've got everything: board, case, charger, cables and mSATA case for US$58. Going to arrive on Thursday. I can't wait.

I'm worried that it's somewhat similar to RPi, I'm guessing it also has the Bus I/O problem as the SATA I/O are also processed by the USB bus but I noticed that only after the purchase. Hope it won't have problems streaming video through GbE.

Yes, I've checked the ODROID C2 and my hand was itching to click on the buy button, but it supports only USB 2.0 and no SATA, even though the processor was pretty good and was the only one to support HDMI 2.0. ODROID XU4 had the SATA but the processor was back to 32 bit and too expensive, not mentioning the need for the active cooling. The only reason I didn't go for Intel/AMD architecture was because I wanted to try something different. I'm not sure what the capabilities of the hardware will be and that's what it was fun about. I didn't check the T3M28PT at the time, but it would have been to expensive for me right now (can buy a reasonably good media server for US$ 80.00 so no point in getting that much expensive).

Also I've noticed from this link (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_single-board_computers#cite_note-https:.2F.2Fgithub.com.2Fhardkernel-116) that basically all arm boards require some kind of kernel patching / customization to work so no difference between the boards in this regard.

Again, thank you.