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crocket
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 Posted: Sat Jan 02, 2021 10:35 am Post subject: 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. |
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dr_wulsen
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 21 Aug 2013
Posts: 146
Location: Austria
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| Posted: Sun Jan 03, 2021 6:44 pm Post subject: Intel NUC |
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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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crocket
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| Posted: Mon Jan 04, 2021 12:18 pm Post subject: Re: Intel NUC |
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| dr_wulsen wrote: | | I can recommend the NUC. |
I'm also considering moving to AMD64 platform. I'm looking to build a firewall with 2 gigabit ethernet ports.
I don't think NUC makes it easy to add another ethernet port.
I can hook up a network switch to a firewall for more ethernet ports.
What do you recommend as AMD64 firewall machines? |
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dr_wulsen
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 21 Aug 2013
Posts: 146
Location: Austria
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| Posted: Mon Jan 04, 2021 10:33 pm Post subject: |
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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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crocket
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| Posted: Tue Jan 05, 2021 2:33 am Post subject: |
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| dr_wulsen wrote: | 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. |
I searched the internet and found some mini PCs with two built-in ethernet ports. They are about 280 US dollars, but they are worth the price because you get hassle-free experience.
The amount of time wasted on ARM platform is worth more than 2,000 US dollars. |
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erm67
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Joined: 01 Nov 2005
Posts: 653
Location: EU
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| Posted: Tue Jan 05, 2021 3:59 pm Post subject: Re: Which SBCs are simple to configure? |
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| crocket wrote: | 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. |
I have a rock64 but it runs openbsd, so obviously doesn't use ext4. rockchip is one of the most linux friendly vendor out there, so what you say sounds very strange to me.
Your SBC uses an rk3328 just like mine, and it supports boot from spi emmc or sd, maybe the nanopi comes with an SPI and on it there is a uboot in flash compiled only with ext4 support, but that sounds very very strange. You probably need to boot a u-boot compiled with your prefereed options from sd. Actually it might be complicated since on my board the SPI flash boots first, and the u-boot there was old (2017) so I had to erase the SPI to force booting from SD.
Try to find a way to boot a different u-boot from a sd card or execute a second u-boot from the first one, this can be problematic expcially if the first u-boot has already initialized the HW but is probably doable.
Do you have a serial and can type commands in the bootloader (u-boot)?
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dr_wulsen
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 21 Aug 2013
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Location: Austria
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| Posted: Tue Jan 05, 2021 8:31 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | The amount of time wasted on ARM platform is worth more than 2,000 US dollars. |
Amen.
Sorry for the spam here, but you just touched my tortured soul with those beautifully phrased words
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crocket
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Joined: 29 Apr 2017
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| Posted: Tue Jan 05, 2021 11:09 pm Post subject: Re: Which SBCs are simple to configure? |
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| erm67 wrote: | I have a rock64 but it runs openbsd, so obviously doesn't use ext4. rockchip is one of the most linux friendly vendor out there, so what you say sounds very strange to me.
Your SBC uses an rk3328 just like mine, and it supports boot from spi emmc or sd, maybe the nanopi comes with an SPI and on it there is a uboot in flash compiled only with ext4 support, but that sounds very very strange. You probably need to boot a u-boot compiled with your prefereed options from sd. Actually it might be complicated since on my board the SPI flash boots first, and the u-boot there was old (2017) so I had to erase the SPI to force booting from SD.
Try to find a way to boot a different u-boot from a sd card or execute a second u-boot from the first one, this can be problematic expcially if the first u-boot has already initialized the HW but is probably doable.
Do you have a serial and can type commands in the bootloader (u-boot)? |
I had to compile friendlyarm's downstream u-boot for its rk3328 SBCs. It is based on u-boot of 2015 or 2014. Its u-boot doesn't let me configure partitions types that are supported. It supports only android images. I wanted it to support GPT partitions.
Mainstream u-boot still doesn't support NanoPi R2S. Downstream u-boot versions for different SBC boards can be wildly different from each other.
I don't want to waste no more time on downstream versions of u-boot. boot.ini looks overly complex, and it doesn't seem documented.
I can still give hardkernel's petitboot a shot, but I prefer x86 platform now.
Raspberry Pi platform is still simple enough.
I still don't like dealing with device trees.
If I buy a fanless x86 mini PC with two ethernet ports, everything is neatly contained in a little metal box. |
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erm67
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| Posted: Wed Jan 06, 2021 5:31 pm Post subject: Re: Which SBCs are simple to configure? |
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| crocket wrote: |
If I buy a fanless x86 mini PC with two ethernet ports, everything is neatly contained in a little metal box. |
or just use the openwrt buildroot for the nanopi R2S if you just want a router but cannot do low level ARM development.
But yes maybe, I was also tempted to move all my arm boards and the nas to a amd64 system, and maybe I will ... but for the moment everything works. The N2 works really well, but I don't use petitboot since it is supported by a recent u-boot and well I don't boot it too often ...
Recently balbes150 stopped releasing kernels for Amlogic SoC but there is still a maintained mainline kernel from a korean guy (toebetter) that works well so there is no reason to replace it.
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crocket
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| Posted: Thu Jan 07, 2021 12:59 am Post subject: |
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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. |
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erm67
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| Posted: Thu Jan 07, 2021 8:46 am Post subject: |
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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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crocket
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| Posted: Thu Jan 07, 2021 11:56 am Post subject: |
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| erm67 wrote: | 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. |
That sounds complex. I want simplicity. Raspberry Pi at least makes boot config simple. |
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Hu
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| Posted: Thu Jan 07, 2021 4:42 pm Post subject: |
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| erm67 wrote: | | 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) |
The forum is titled "Gentoo on ARM", and topics about ARM on other boards than raspberryPI are welcome. We may not have many active members that will support or discuss other ARM boards, but that is not the fault of the Gentoo project. |
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xaviermiller
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Joined: 23 Jul 2004
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| Posted: Thu Jan 07, 2021 4:52 pm Post subject: |
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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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erm67
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Joined: 01 Nov 2005
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| Posted: Fri Jan 08, 2021 12:49 pm Post subject: |
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| Hu wrote: | | erm67 wrote: | | 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) |
The forum is titled "Gentoo on ARM", and topics about ARM on other boards than raspberryPI are welcome. We may not have many active members that will support or discuss other ARM boards, but that is not the fault of the Gentoo project. |
Well I never said it is fault of the gentoo project of course, but it is a well known fact that there is only support for the raspberryPI and also that is not "official"
I used gentoo on aarch64 for years and from time time there were a few attempts to support more boards from the wiki to other parts but probably there never was a critical mass. Also the choice to bet everything on crosscompiling was not a user choice, as the wiki stated 'gentoo ARM is crosscompiling only', while at the same time aarch64 systems were getting faster over time, it is/was definitely stupid, expecially once USB3 ports and SSD became ubiquitous. Don't know if that changed recently in gentoo as well but outside gentoo nobody crosscompiles anymore.
Recently *BSD are jumping on the aarch64 train, so I switched to OpenBSD recently, NetBSD has an excellent support and FreeBSD is catching up with official support and pre build images for various boards, all of them offer a ports tree that compile natively. A funny thing I noticed recently in their forums is that a lot of people using aarch64 boards used gentoo previously. Maybe they are not there because the ports let them compile natively.
Their prebuilt offer, is just a stage4 i.e. a generic armv8 stage3 packaged with a bootloader specific for a board. It is a task that can be easily automated. The kernel can support multiple boards, Armbian has a generic kernel that runs on Amlogic, Rockchip, and Allwinner just switching the DTB. As long as aarch64 .config is based on arm64 defconfig and is not copied from x86_64 it can work on multiple boards.
have a look at the number bootable images offered by netbsd:
http://www.armbsd.org/arm/
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Last edited by erm67 on Fri Jan 08, 2021 1:29 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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erm67
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| Posted: Fri Jan 08, 2021 12:57 pm Post subject: |
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| xaviermiller wrote: |
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. |
It would be nice to offer prebuild images, since most users cannot do that. All they want is download an image burn it an run the OS. There should be at least a live.
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True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.
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Gentoo on ARM
