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Discussion (191 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I think everyone considering an SBC should be warned that none of these are going to be supported by upstream in the way a cheap Intel or AMD desktop will be.
Even the Raspberry Pi 5, one of the most well supported of the SBCs, is still getting trickles of mainline support.
The trend of buying SBCs for general purpose compute is declining, thankfully, as more people come to realize that these are not the best options for general purpose computing.
Going big-name doesn't even help you here. It's the same story with Nvidia's Jetson platforms; they show up, then within 2-3 years they're abandonware, trapped on an ancient kernel and EOL Ubuntu distro.
You can't build a product on this kind of support timeline.
I thought raspberry pi could basically run a mainline kernel these days -- are there unsupported peripherals besides Broadcom's GPU?
The major difference is Raspberry Pi maintains a parallel fork of Linux and keeps it up to date with LTS and new releases, even updating their Pi OS to later kernels faster than the upstream Debian releases.
Were people actually doing that?
If the RPI came with any recent mid-tier Snapdragon SOC, it might be interesting. Or if someone made a Linux distro that supports all devices on one of the Snapdragon X Elite laptops, that would be interesting.
Instead, it's more like the equivalent of a cheap desktop with integrated GPU from 20 years ago, on a single board, with decent linux support, and GPIO. So it's either a linux learning toy, or an integrated component within another product, and not much in between.
I have a couple of RPi4 with 8GB and 4GB RAM respectively, these I have been using as kind-of general computers (they're running off SSDs instead of SD cards). I've had no reason so far to replace them with anything Intel/AMD. On the other hand they can't replace my laptop computer - though I wish they could, as I use the laptop computer with an external display and external keyboard 100% of the time, so its form factor is just in the way. But there's way too little RAM on the SBCs. It's bad enough on the laptop computer, with its measly 16GB.
I wouldn't wish it upon an enemy, but it's a thing.
I think in all cases it's the sheer novelty of doing something with a different ISA and form factor. Having built and racked my share of servers I see no reason to build a miniature datacenter in my home but, hey, to each their own.
If we take a step back, I think this is something to be saddened by. I, too, find boards without proper mainline support to be e-waste, and I am glad that we perhaps aren't producing quite as much of that anymore. But imagine if a good chunk of these boards did indeed have great mainline support. These incredibly cheap devices would be a perfect guarantor of democratized, unstoppable general compute in the face of the forces that many of us fear are rising. Even if that's not a fear you share, they'd make the perfect tinkering environment for children and adults not otherwise exposed to such things.
Came looking for this. It's the pitfall of 99% of hardware projects. They get a great team of hardware engineer, they go through the maddening of actually producing a thing (which is crazy complex) at scale, economically viable (hopefully), logistic hurdles including tax worldwide, tariffs, etc... only to have only people on their team be able to build and run a Hello World example.
To be fair even big player, e.g. NVIDIA, sucks at that too. Sure they have their GPU and CUDA but if you look at the "small" things like Jetson everybody I met told me the same thing, great hardware, unusable because the stack worked once when shipped then wasn't maintained.
The reality for actual products is even worse. Qualcomm and Broadcom (even before the PE acquisition) are some of the worst companies to work with imaginable. I’ve had situations where we wasted a month tracking down a bug only for our Qualcomm account manager to admit that the bug was in a peripheral and in their errata already but couldn’t share the whole thing with us, among many other horror stories. I’d rather crawl through a mile of broken glass than have to deal with that again, so I have an extreme aversion to using anything but RPi, as distasteful as that is sometimes.
This is a common business model sadly where the seller wants the buyer to buy an additional support contract for any actual firmware development.
There are no ARM NUCs at such prices, and even if there were the GNU/Linux support would be horrible.
Unless you strictly need the tiny form factor of an SBC you are so much better going with x86.
1: https://www.ecs.com.tw/en/Product/Mini-PC/LIVA_Q2/
It's 127 x 127 x 508 mm. I think most mini N100 PCs are around that size.
The OrangePi 5 Max board is 89x57mm (it says 1.6mm "thickness" on the spec sheet but I think that is a typo - the ethernet port is more than that)
Add a few mm for a case and it's roughly 2/3 as long and half the width of the A40.
[1] https://manuals.plus/asin/B0DG8P4DGV
Sometimes easier to acquire, but usually the same price or more expensive.
Big by comparison, but still pretty small
It has major overheating issues though, the N100 was never meant to be put on such a tiny PCB.
Unreliable USB: https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/3259
Unreliable Wi-Fi:
* https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/7092
* https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/7111
* https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/7272
I don't understand why many say that RPi software/firmware support is 'fantastic'. Maybe it used to be in the beginning compared to other chips and boards, but right now it's a bit above average: they ignore many things which is out of their control/can't debug and fix (as in Wi-Fi chip firmware).
Because other vendors are way worse. Those tickets would not be "unreliable" but simply "broken" with a "Won't fix" status.
Check the Wi-Fi tickets, they are sitting without any replies from the RPi team since 2025. It is broken in these configurations, I decided not to use this strong general term for this case (it's broken only in certain configurations and use cases).
The USB bug (from 2019) has not be fully fixed. They got it much less extent, but did not eliminate the issue.
>Because other vendors are way worse.
There's only a single difference: Chinese vendors don't fix issues in both things they do control and in things they don't. The thing they control is usually a "Distro Build" or Buildroot rootfs hierarchy, which I personally see little value in.
Bugs related to third-party hardware and firmware present on the board gets rarely fixed by both sides.
Don't get me wrong, I'm absolutely not happy with it. I bought Intel NUC, which has Intel Ethernet and Intel Wi-Fi, as my PC with the idea that Intel has end-user support and writes drivers, and NUCs should come with golden Linux support, right? Yet Intel developers still supposed that I had to fix the bug in Intel drivers myself: https://marc.info/?l=linux-pci&m=175368780217953&w=2
There's a reason people just default to RaspberryPi even though better _hardware_ exists. RPi at least gets drivers and software support consistently.
https://www.armbian.com/boards?vendor=xunlong
Worse, if you flash it to UEFI you’ll lose compat with the one system that did support it (older versions of BredOS). For that, you grab an old release, and never update. If you’re running something simple that you know won’t benefit from any update at all, that’s great. An RK3588 is a decent piece of kit though, and it really deserves better.
As far as I can tell, the OrangePi 6 remains distinctly uncompetitive with SBCs based on low-end intel chips.
- Orange pi consumes much more power (despite being an arm CPU) - A bit faster on some benchmarks, a bit slower on others - Intel SBC is about 60% the price, and comes with case + storage - Intel SBC runs mainline linux and everything has working drivers
Don't bother trying anything before kernel 6.18.x -- unless you are willing to stick with their 6.1.x kernel with a million+ line diff.
The u-boot environment that comes with the board is hacked up. eg: It supports an undocumented amount of extlinux.conf ... just enough that whatever Debian writes by default, breaks it. Luckily, the u-boot project does support the board and I was able to flash a newer u-boot to the boot media and then the onboard flash [1].
Now the hdmi port doesn't show anything and I use a couple of serial pins when I need to do anything before it's on-net.
--
I purchased a Rock 5T (also rk3588) and the story is similar ... but upstream support for the board is much worse. Doing a diff between device trees [2] (supplied via custom Debian image vs vanilla kernel) tells me a lot. eg: there are addresses that are different between the two.
Upstream u-boot doesn't have support for the board explicitly.
No display, serial console doesn't work after boot.
I just wanted this board for its dual 2.5Gb ethernet ports but the ports even seem buggy. It might be an issue with my ISP... they seem to think otherwise.
--
Not being able to run a vanilla kernel/u-boot is a deal-breaker for me. If I can't upgrade my kernel to deal with a vulnerability without the company existing/supporting my particular board, I'm not comfortable using it.
IMHO, these boards exist in a space somewhere between the old-embedded world (where just having a working image is enough) and the modern linux world (where one needs to be able to update/apply patches)
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/OrangePI/comments/1l6hnqk/comment/n...
[2] https://gist.github.com/imoverclocked/1354ef79bd24318b885527...
Not on this list is the current GPU Vulkan drivers Collabora are working on too. Don't think that's really blame Rockchip since they're ARM Mali-G610 GPUs, but yeah those didn't get stable in Mesa until last year.
It's pretty hacky for sure but wouldn't classify it as useless. e.g. I managed to get some LLMs to run on the NPU of an Orange pi 5 a while back
I see there is now even a NPU compatible llama.cpp fork though haven't tried it
I guess manjaro just abandoned arm entirely. The options are armbian (probably the pragmatic choice, but fsck systemd), or openbsd (no video acceleration because the drivers are gpl for some dumb reason).
This sort of thing is less likely to happen to rpi, but it’s also getting pretty frustrating at this point.
Er?
https://manjaro.org/products/download/arm explicitly lists the pinebook pro?
Maybe the LLM was wrong and manjaro completely broke the gpg chain (again), but it spent a long time following mirror links, checking timestamps and running internet searches, and I spent over an hour on manual debugging.
Often they can go their entire lifespan without some hardware feature being usable because of lack of software.
The blunt truth is that someone has to make that software, and you can't expect someone to make it for you. They may make it for you, and that's great, but really if you want a feature supported, it either has to already be supported, or you have to make the support.
It will be interesting to see if AI gets to the point that more people are capable of developing their own resources. It's a hard task and a lot of devices means the hackers are spread thin. It would be nice to see more people able to meaningfully contribute.
Right?
I think it's a good thing that people are realizing that these SBCs are better used as development tools for people who understand embedded dev instead of as general purpose PCs. For years now you can find comments under every Raspberry Pi or other SBC thread informing everyone that a mini PC is a better idea for general purpose compute unless you really need something an SBC offers, like specific interfaces or low power.
ARM devices aren't even really similar to one another. As a weird example, the Raspberry Pi boots from the GPU, which brings up the rest of the hardware.
Is it the lack of drivers in upstream? Is it something to do with how ARM devices seemingly can't install Linux the same way x86 machines can (something something device tree)?
Someone still has to put in meaningful effort to get the AI to do it and ship it.
https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms/tree/master/Plat...
https://github.com/edk2-porting/edk2-rk3588
However many of these ARM chips have their own sub-architecture in the Linux source tree, I'm not sure that it's possible today to build a single image with them all built in and choose the subarchitecture at runtime. Theoretically it could be done, of course, but who has the incentive to do that work?
(I seem to remember Linus complaining about this situation to the Arm maintainer, maybe 10-20 years ago)
[1] https://docs.u-boot.org/en/v2021.04/uefi/uefi.html
The flash images contain information used by the bios to configure and bring up the device. It's more than just a filesystem. Just because it's not the standard consoomer "bios menu" you're used to doesn't mean it's wrong. It's just different.
These boards are based off of solutions not generally made available to the public. As a result, they require a small amount of technical knowledge beyond what operating a consumer PC might require.
So, packaging a standard arm linux install into a "custom" image is perfectly fine, to be honest.
the firmware is usually an extremely minimal set of boot routines loaded on the SOC package itself. to save space and cost, their goal is to jump to an external program.
so, many reasons
- firmware is less modular, meaning you cant ship hardware variants without also shipping firmware updates (the boot blob contains the device tree). also raises cost (see next)
- requires flash, which adds to BOM. intended designs of these ultra low cost SOCs would simply ship a single emmc (which the SD card replaces)
- no guaranteed input device for interactive setup. they'd have to make ui variants, including for weird embedded devices (such as a transit kiosk). and who is that for? a technician who would just reimage the device anyways?
- firmware updates in the field add more complexity. these are often low service or automatic service devices
anyways if you're shipping a highly margin sensitive, mass market device (such as a set top box, which a lot of these chipsets were designed for), the product is not only the SOC but the board reference design. when you buy a pi-style product, you're usually missing out on a huge amount of normally-included ecosystem.
that means that you can get a SBC for cheap using mass produced merchant silicon, but the consumer experience is sub-par. after all, this wasn't designed for your use case :)
Proprietary and closed? One can hope.
Using whatever compute you have sitting in a drawer usually makes the most sense (including an old phone).
With that being said, CIX and their main board partner, Radxa, have been open with the UEFI.
I am not an expert in low-level environments such as the kernel or the UEFI, but if these tidbits sound interesting I would encourage anyone who is to look further into the CIX P1. To my untrained eyes, CIX looks like a company that is working towards a desktop/laptop chip with real UEFI/ACPI support. I look forward to the day it is polished up a bit.
Can also plug in a power bank. https://us.ugreen.com/collections/power-bank?sort_by=price-d...
The advantage is that if the machine breaks or is upgraded, the dock and pb can be retained. Would also distribute the price.
The dock and pb can also be kept away to lower heat to avoid a fan in the housing, ideally.
Better hardware should end up leading to better software - its main problem right now.
This 10-in-1 dock even has an SSD enclosure for $80 https://us.ugreen.com/products/ugreen-10-in-1-usb-c-hub-ssd (no affiliation) (no drivers required)
I'd have another dock/power/screen combo for traveling and portable use.
How much otherwise highly useful stuff are people sitting on that they can't get going (or going well) for one reason or another? Also, recycling I expect will end up important at some point, and knowing who has what (and where) could expedite this process.
That's how PCIe works. A PCIe port - both upstream and downstream - is a "PCI bridge". The link is one bus. A switch chip's "interior" is another bus. The next links are each their own bus again. One per port. There's no switch here, bus 0 ( / 30 / 60)is "in" the CPU, each port is it's own bus.
The more interesting thing is the PCI domain, the first 4 digits:
This generally (caveat emptor) means the ports aren't handled in some common PCIe subsystem, rather each port is independently connected to the CPU crossbar. The ports may also not be able to access each other, or non-transparent mapping rules apply.Doesn't have to, though; it might be due to some technicality, driver bug, misunderstanding, whatever else.
``` alias findpi='sudo nmap -sP 192.168.1.0/24 | awk '\''/^Nmap/{ip=$NF}/B8:27:EB|DC:A6:32|E4:5F:01|28:CD:C1/{print ip}'\''' ```
On every `.bashrc` i have.
But I just don't get... everything, I don't get the org, I don't get the users on hn, I'm like skinner in the 'no the kids are wrong' meme.
It's a lambda. It's a cheap, plug in, ssh, forget. And it's bloody wonderful.
If you buy a 1 or 2 off ebay, ok maybe a 3.
After that? Get a damn computer.
Want more bandwidth on the rj45? Get a computer.
Want faster usb? Get a computer.
Want ssd? Get a computer
Want a retro computing device? Get a computer.
Want a computer experience? Etc etc etc, i don't need to labour this.
Want something that will sit there, have ssh and run python scripts for years without a reboot? Spend 20 quid on ebay.
People demanded faster horses. And the raspi org, for some, damn fool, reason, tried to give them.
There are people bemoaning the fact that raspberry pi's aren't able to run LLM's. And will then, without irony, complain that the prices are too high. For the love of God, raspi org, stop listening to dickheads on the Internet. Stop paying youtubers to shill. Stop and focus.
You won't win this game
It's like commercial success is a three step tragedy:
(1) solve 1 problem well
(2) pivot to trying to solve all problems for all users, undermining (1) but chasing mass adoption
(3) pivot back to solving 1 problem again, this time for a very specific whale customer with very specific needs, undermining (1) and (2)
I would say Arduino is at step (3) and RPI is at (2)
> On every `.bashrc` i have.
You might want to try mDNS / avahi
I've still been on the hunt for a cheap Arm board with a Armv8.3+ or Arvm9.0+ SoC for OSDev stuff, but it's hard to find them in hobbyist price range (this board included, $700-900 USD from what I see).
The NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nanos looked good but unfortunately SWD/JTAG is disabled unless you pay for the $2k model...
Yep, I'll pass. I'm done dealing with that kind of crap that is spread like a nasty STD through the ARM world. I'm sticking with x64 unless/until ARM gets this crap together.
But at a certain point I guess it just breaks? And they need an objective "I gave these tokens, I got out those tokens". But I guess that would need an objective gold standard ground truth that's maybe hard to come by.
This is an honest, neutral question, and it's specifically about what can concretely be done with them right now. Their theoretical use is clear to me. I'm explicitly asking only about their practical use, in the present time.
(One of the reasons I am asking is I am wondering if this is a classic case of the hardware running too far ahead of the actual needs and the result is hardware that badly mismatches the actual needs, e.g., an "NPU" that blazingly accelerates a 100 million parameter model because that was "large" when someone wrote the specs down, but is uselessly small in practice. Sometimes this sort of thing happens. However I'm still honestly interested just in what can be done with them right now.)
If you're in the business of selling unbundled edge accelerators, you're strongly incentivized to modularize your NPU software stack for arbitrary hosts, which increases the likelihood that it actually works, and for more than one particular kernel.
If I had an embedded AI use case, this is something I'd look at hard.
I couldn't imagine recommending any of these boards to people who aren't already SBC tinkerers.
There are some perplexity comparison numbers for the previous gen - Orange pi 5 in link below.
Bit of a mixed bag, but doesn't seem catastrophic across the board. Some models are showing minimal perplexity loss at Q8...
https://github.com/invisiofficial/rk-llama.cpp/blob/rknpu2/g...
Is this a thing? I read an article about how due to some implementation detail of GPUs, you don't actually get deterministic outputs even with temp 0.
But I don't understand that, and haven't experimented with it myself.
The main difference comes from rounding order of reduction difference.
It does make a small difference. Unless you have an unstable floating point algorithm, but if you have an unstable floating point algorithm on a GPU at low precision you were doomed from the start.
Massively simplified, 2.5G is 1G sped up while 5G is 10G slowed down. It makes no sense and the market agrees. The ladder of popularity goes:
1000base-T, <long break>, 10Gbase-T, 2.5Gbase-T, <long break>, 5Gbase-T. (Depends on context ofc, 2.5G is quite popular on APs for example.)
And note a lot of 10Gbase-T hardware is not Nbase-T compatible, and there are chips that do only 1G, 2.5G and 10G - no 5G.
I guess if your design doesn't work at 10GbT you try with 5? Ugh.