On Fri, Dec 25, 2015 at 11:31 AM, Robert Moskowitz rgm@htt-consult.com wrote:
On 12/25/2015 11:18 AM, Troy Dawson wrote:
Hi, Have you looked at the pcduino3 nano lite. $15 and it looks like it meets all your specs.
http://www.amazon.com/pcDuino-pcDuino3-Nano-Lite/dp/B00ZEPZGQO/ref=sr_1_1?ie...
It has everything in the kernel and uboot and works with Fedora 23 with no modifications. I've got Yor Linux armv7 build working on it, so I'm quite certain it will work with CentOS arm build, but I have not tested it.
There are two downsides to this board. 1 - the sata (and power cable) are sold separately
Ah, I see it does have a sata port. I missed that the first time.
And it looks like it has the 5V power out that will hopefully power any HD up to 1A.
If it uses the same uboot as the pcduino 3 nano, then I can take the Cubietruck image and dd the appropriate uboot and boot.
Have you tested it? The big test is to only have uboot on a 4Gb mSD and the whole image on the Sata HD and see if it switches over like the Cubieboard does. Otherwise there is a lot of customization needed.
Yes, I've tested it. It used the same uboot and kernel dtd as the pcduino 3 nano. I have a couple of the pcduino 3 nano machines and ordered a couple of the lite's, so I've used both. I used the nano uboot on the lite and it worked with no modifications. I also did nothing with the kernel and it worked great.
I am assuming those 3 posts off to the side are for the serial console. Nice that they put it off to the side. But that would mess up a case somewhat.
2 - It has the worst name I can think of.
On Fri, Dec 25, 2015 at 5:33 AM, Robert Moskowitz rgm@htt-consult.com wrote:
The features that have attracted me to ARMv7 are:
- Power consumption
My ROI on power savings was 15 mo. with the Cubieboards over my current Intel SFF boxes. And along with that is lower UPS requirements and heating. I have 5 boards, plus drives powered from one USB power supply.
- Board size
With boards the same or smaller than a 25" drive, I truly have an appliance that can be placed anywhere.
Now there are few ARMv7 boards that meet my exacting requirements: 1 or 2 MB ram (depending on appl), 2+ core, and SATA interface.
If all I have is USB, then I get the USB/SATA adapter cost and powering thrown into the equation. Also a board that has been moved into the mainline kernel and distro support. RPi stands out as being a pain. 4-port LAN features require kernel customization.
I was talking with one manufacture that was meeting my main req at $15/board. But they went for a mass-market target and dropped the DIY one. I will be talking to them again next month. But their board is not in the general sunxi effort. Yet.
On 12/25/2015 01:33 AM, Gordan Bobic wrote:
The big problems I have with the majority of the development boards are:
- Memory
On 32-bit ARM, the RAM was always limited to 4GB, which would be find if there were a significant number of devices available that ship with 4GB of RAM (minus the various necessary memory holes). But that simply isn't the case. I can think of hundreds of devices with <= 1GB of RAM. I can think of only about 4 with 3-4GB of RAM (of which at least 2 are deprecated and unavailable), including ARMv8 which is not limited to 4GB. And two of those four are laptops.
- Memory Type
We've been being told since forever that the main reason why ARM devices don't come with DIMM sockets is because they are 32-bit and DIMMs have 64 data lines. Well, with ARMv8 we have those 64 data lines, and yet there are precious few devices available featuring DIMM sockets for memory. There are in fact probably more dev boards in SODIMM form factor than there are those featuring DIMM memory sockets.
- Board Form Factor
There are painfully few ARM boards in *TX form factor. Off the top of my head I can think of a total of 5, of which one is positively ancient and probably no longer available (Atmel, IIRC), one is deprecated, the manufacturer of the 3rd appears to have gone bust, one is on the underpowered side (VIA APC) and the 5th is exorbitantly expensive (at €800 there is no incentive at all to buy an ARM board instead of a much more powerful, more fully featured and better supported Xeon board).
Worse, these variously deficient devices aren't exactly cheap, either (well, apart from the Raspberry Pis). I find the lack of supply of boards with sensible features quite thoroughly baffling, especially since the rock bottom features (if they cut any more corners they'd be perfect spheres) don't match the relatively high prices.
Instead of leveraging decades of industry standardization on the basics such as memory sockets, form factor (including power supplies), almost every ARM board manufacturer seems to be intent on reinventing their own wheels, and doing a pretty poor job of it, even though these problems have been thoroughly solved for decades.
Not that I think any manufacturers are listening...
Gordan
On 24/12/15 21:20, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
On 12/23/2015 07:45 PM, miniNodes Info wrote:
The Lenovator HiKey board Jim mentioned can be found here: http://www.lenovator.com/product/90.html That is a 2gb RAM, 8gb eMMC, 8-core ARM64 board.
No sata for all that power. And draws a lot more power too.
I will continue to wait to see what the Cubietruck plus will be and how much. They put out the blog on it back in July. And then Hans will have to get one to make the uboot for it...
They also offer a 1gb RAM version as well:
http://www.lenovator.com/product/86.html http://www.lenovator.com/product/86.html http://www.lenovator.com/product/86.html
Also worth mentioning, the Qualcomm Dragonboard 410c finally has been restocked and has availability now, located here:
https://www.arrow.com/en/products/dragonboard410c/arrow-development-tools#pa...
Even less in terms of interfaces.
The URL for the PINE64 board is simply http://pine64.com http://pine64.comhttp://pine64.com. That product is still being developed and funded via Kickstarter, so there is no general availability on that one quite yet.
So, for now, I will stay with the armv7.
Arm-dev mailing list Arm-dev@centos.org https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/arm-dev
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Arm-dev mailing listArm-dev@centos.orghttps://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/arm-dev
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