Odroid - Amlogic SoC support/experience with Slackware ARM
I'm following the development of these ARM SoCs, constantly looking for the next usable, passively cooled, compact and well performing ARM board in the ~50USD/EUR range to upgrade the Raspberry Pi 2B. I'm using a few Rpi Pi2B boards for simple business solutions and can't consider any available, unreliably performing (overheating&throttling), boards for upgrades.
Stumbled upon an article today, mentioning the ODROID-N2: https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?t=33781 At $63, it's almost at the edge, but it delivers solid and sustainable performance, and that's what I'm actually looking after. (there are some performance / temperature graphs in the link) At the edge, in case you're wondering, because with 30USD/EUR more there are already decent x86 Mini PCs available (100Mbit Ethernet sucks, but there might be alternatives): https://www.amazon.com/ACEPC-T8-x5-Z...dp/B07D9YX3W6/ https://www.amazon.de/ACEPC-L%C3%BCf...dp/B07HC7M87W/ https://www.iacepc.com/acepc-w8-pro/ I searched this forum, looking after odroid experience and found only an encouraging post from Linux.tar.gz: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...8/#post5816348 Wondering if these Odroid - Amlogic SoC boards are that hard to configure and if Slackware ARM would run fine on them. Any inputs appreciated. Thanks! |
SoC is interesting (finally 4 GB of memory), in the rest everything will depend on the community. Armbian will most likely (want / try) to support this board.
On the lower radiator it is understood that this SoC will be quite hot (as well as rockchip rk3399) At the moment, for the same money, you can buy a rock pi 4B with similar functionality + there is M2 NVME At the moment, my desktop is ROCKPro64 with ROOT on the NVME, and according to my feelings this is a very productive solution for little money. Аlthough it would be interesting to work with Amlogic SoC. And if there are basic components (boot loader, kernel, hardware initialization tree) for this SoC, you can easily add slackware support to build_kit build scripts |
Thanks for your inputs. The kernel is on Github and I'm only focusing on Slackware ARM. My actual problem with this Odroid board is related to the booting sequence (and u-boot), as I have no experience with it but only reading the threads here on Slackware ARM forum. Always wondering how "primitive" and complicated the whole process is.
https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-xu4/s...-boot_mainline https://github.com/hardkernel/u-boot It's OK if you have plenty of time available to make the board boot, tinkering, as a hobby, but not a business solution. This and the unreliable performance levels on these newer pumped-up ARM SoCs (overheating&throttling) is what drove me to consider x86 (Atom) as a better alternative (BIOS, mainline x86 support, etc). It also looks like the gap is closing between ARM&X86, related to both price&performance, away from any subjective impression, but having a more practical/pragmatic view. I already read your other thread presenting the Rock Pi 4B, but found the NanoPi M4 better, it has a PCIex2 bus and a bottom mounted SoC + Heatsink, plus a USB-C socket for the power (I just hate the microUSB, totally unreliable for currents above 1A). But, it's again pretty expensive to start with (case+Heatsink) and the accessories, like this interesting SATA HAT, are pricy too: https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.ph...product_id=234 https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.ph...product_id=254 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knS854Taz-E |
Mr. Torvalds trashing the ARM for servers&desktops "dream":
https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/...rpostid=183486 Quote:
https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/...rpostid=183500 I guess I'll stop pursuing my "dreams" with the ARM boxes (Odroid in this case) in the business environment and limit to just tinker/hobby with these cheap dev boards, use them for simple and specific tasks instead. |
Quote:
The ARM ecosystem is in some ways like Mandelbrot set, although it didn't start out that way. I mean, just thinking about it. If there were a far smaller set of machines available, but that were of decent spec and used the same 'standards', Slackware ARM would be able to run on most of the machines out there; yet it's like developing in 1990 for NetScape, IE and all that nonsense. |
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