Which SBCs are simple to configure?

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I bought NanoPi R2S. It seems that rockchip SBCs require /boot(boot.img) and /(rootfs.img) partitions to be wrapped in ext4 android images before writing them to a microSD card.

If I have to deal with ext4 android images, I don't want to work with rockchip SBCs.

What simple SBCs do you know other than Raspberry Pi? Although Raspberry Pi comes with a bunch of suspicious binary blobs that may or may not be spywares, it is at least simple to configure.

[dr_wulsen]

I can recommend the NUC.
It may not hit the Raspberry-definition of a SBC, but my NUC5CPYH (Celeron with 2x2,4GHz) is a cheap (~100 EUR) alternative.
Cheap? Yes, when compared to the RasPi, for the money you get:
* An X86_64 architecture which makes working with gentoo and compilations much, much easier (if you have more experience on x86 than ARM)
* TOSLINK output and a quite usable analog 3.5mm on the same jack
* CIR (Consumer IR) which out-of-the-box can power the NUC off and ON without additional fiddling and hardware. (MCE Keyboard mode for the remote, you're good to go)
* The option to upgrade your RAM should you ever run out of memory
* SATA or M2 depending on your choice
* It comes in a case already
* Mine takes in a max. of 15W Edit: that's at least the peak the power supply is rated at and it hasn't blown up yet. Actual consumption should be less
* Gigabit Ethernet on a real GbE chip throughput at home: 95MB/s sustained for big files.
* WiFi and Bluetooth built-in
* ...but NO HDMI-CEC at least not on my machine.
* a very regular UEFI Setup

Hard to guess that mine is running as a media center with some additional things (bittorrent and the likes)
I don't know if that's of any help to you, but I've switched from the RasPi (had them from 1 to 4) to a NUC and have not regretted it ever since.
Even more positive things about it: I got a lot more sleep due to it being a PC I know instead of a tinker-board.
Sure enough, if you are seeking things like GPIO and high energy-efficiency - the NUC is out of question.
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[dr_wulsen]

I've never had the joy to choose a SFF/SBC with two gigabit Ethenet ports, but depending on your need and faith in USB - a proper USB3-to-GbE-Adapter would give you the second port.
Actually, it wouldn't be much different from the single GbE port on a RasPi3 (which never deliverd GbE speed, because it was connected via USB2 internally).

For firewalling, all kind of weird services (syncthing, NFS, VPN, Firewalling) I just use my Linksys WRT1200 AC router running OpenWRT.
It's got two distinct gigabit interfaces, one of them on a 4-way switch that can handle basic VLAN capability. It uses even less power, has eSATA and USB3;
I've set it up to put my additional setup and system on an external drive, so now it's a 4TB NAS/Firewall/Wifi 2.4/5GHz/router/traffic shaper (SQM; Bufferbloat) and it just runs very smooth without much fiddling.
Speed over NFS is a sustained 95MB/s; so I definitely get gigabit speed to and from the HDD connected via USB3.

Regarding AMD64, I don't have any proper suggestions, sorry.
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There's no stupid questions, only stupid answers.

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[erm67]

[dr_wulsen]

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[erm67]

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We are guinea pigs for ARM platform development. We are beta testers. That's why ARM SBCs are ridiculously cheap for now. If ARM platform was as easy as x86 platform, ARM SBCs wouldn't be as cheap as they are now.

By the way, x86 mini PCs based on N4100, J4150, or similar CPUs consume little electricity. There's not much difference in electricity consumption between ARM SBCs and x86 mini PCs.
If you have enough money to live on, you can definitely afford x86 mini PCs.

Look into Odroid H2+. Hardkernel SBCs that use petitboot may be also worth looking into.

Don't waste time on SBCs that doesn't come with easy-to-configure bootaloders.

[erm67]

Well this forum is raspberryPI only, so don't really expect help here, this is definitely the wrong place to learn anything about ARM. (Another missed opportunity for gentoo btw)
But otherwise u-boot is great, a lot of time ago also amlogic SoC had a proprietary and very limited u-boot, but since u-boot can boot itself the problem was easy to solve. Some older SoC still run Armbian this way. The first vendor provided u-boot initializes the hardware and than loads in memory a vanilla u-boot for the SoC and runs it, the second u-boot, with networking/linux partitions/filesystems support perform the boot. I have not done that since 2019 when Amlogic paid some programmers to port u-boot mainline to their platform but I used this method to boot from iscsi on a older board ... I am also too busy to really help.
That friendlyarm board doesn't have any fancy HW so a vanilla rk3228 u-boot will definitely work as second stage boot loader, it just slow down a bit the boot process.
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Ok boomer
True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.
Ab esse ad posse valet, a posse ad esse non valet consequentia

My fediverse account: @erm67@erm67.dynu.net

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[Hu]

[xaviermiller]

I have 3 arm systems : a Rapberry Pi 1, 1 Helios4 (armada388) and Helios64 (Rockchip "rockit64" 3399), and planning for other boards (at least for a router/firewall)

All of them running Gentoo

The difficult part is configuring the bootloader (but it's done once) and finding the right kernel patches. I acquire only boards that have source and decent documentation.
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Kind regards,
Xavier Miller

[erm67]

[erm67]