Ringing in 2015 with 40 Linux-friendly hacker SBCs (LinuxGizmos) [LWN.net]

Ringing in 2015 with 40 Linux-friendly hacker SBCs (LinuxGizmos)

Posted Dec 31, 2014 22:47 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (9 responses)

I'm searching for a small SOC to handle my routing/media/backup needs. Raspberry Pi is just a bit too underpowered for that.

Lots of options out there, but it's very hard to find something that is supported by the mainline kernel or something fairly close to it. For example, I had a Cubietruck board (killed it by plugging into power 12V supply) which was nice but its kernel is some kind of Frankenstein monster.

Would be nice if reviewers could annotate the boards with the amount of third-party tweaking to the kernel and userspace.

Ringing in 2015 with 40 Linux-friendly hacker SBCs (LinuxGizmos)

Posted Jan 1, 2015 0:56 UTC (Thu) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link]

Cubietruck is nice - and should be handled by Debian Stretch (version 8 when it gets released).

The Frankenkernel has better support for audio/video etc. but a Cubietruck will still make a good headless server on Debian armhf - see Mark Brown's recent post in planet.debian.org.

Ringing in 2015 with 40 Linux-friendly hacker SBCs (LinuxGizmos)

Posted Jan 1, 2015 19:33 UTC (Thu) by kjp (guest, #39639) [Link]

On the high end, before christmas newegg was selling a fanless baytrail for 109. Price is all over the place - I got it for 129. Now its 179 which is ridiculous. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856... Seems like its only a matter of time until <100. Considering I can put a vanilla distro on it, I consider the time savings worth it. And its extremely small.

Ringing in 2015 with 40 Linux-friendly hacker SBCs (LinuxGizmos)

Posted Jan 1, 2015 20:16 UTC (Thu) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link] (2 responses)

The little SOC boards are cool and all, but all of them are slow and limited. Do what I did and build a tiny system based on AMD E-350 (Bobcat) or a similar x86_64 board. 16 GB RAM and it can fill a 1 Gbps Ethernet connection while streaming from its 4 TB of WD Red drives. The whole thing uses about 40 W while running.

Ringing in 2015 with 40 Linux-friendly hacker SBCs (LinuxGizmos)

Posted Jan 2, 2015 11:48 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

40W is about 35W more than I'm willing to allow. And also I've yet to see a _small_ x86-based box that doesn't require active cooling.

Also, 40W won't be a good fit for my non-ventilated closet. Currently all my devices in this closet (cable modem, RPi, 4HD RAID) together use about 20W and it gets uncomfortably warm there during summer days.

Ringing in 2015 with 40 Linux-friendly hacker SBCs (LinuxGizmos)

Posted Jan 4, 2015 3:39 UTC (Sun) by jeff_marshall (subscriber, #49255) [Link]

the Edison SBC doesn't seem to need active cooling. So far, my only complaint with Edison is that I wish they would have just built everything on the breakout board (but this is a minor nit - future projects I build may include a custom board w/ the edison connector).

Currently, I'm toying with the idea of using the Edison as a replacement for my px4 as a flight computer for the tricopter I built. If I had more time for toy projects, I suspect it would be done already...

Ringing in 2015 with 40 Linux-friendly hacker SBCs (LinuxGizmos)

Posted Jan 4, 2015 3:04 UTC (Sun) by rbrito (guest, #66188) [Link] (2 responses)

I am on the same boat. I would also like one small machine where I could essentially just run XBMC/Kodi from my NAS (so that I can watch lectures, let my little one see his cartoons etc.)

Unfortunately, the information provided on that site could use some improvements.

For instance, if it were presented in a tabular fashion (ideally with rows that can be reordered, like in Wikipedia), that would help so much, because the way it is, it is very hard to visualize what are the features that one cares about and what are the features that one doesn't.

Ringing in 2015 with 40 Linux-friendly hacker SBCs (LinuxGizmos)

Posted Jan 4, 2015 6:21 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

I just bought an ameridroid c1 board. Looks OK for now, it's plenty fast (quadcore 1.5GHz CPUs) its MMC interface is fast enough for me to not care about and it even has a nice graphics card.

And it definitely is MUCH faster than RPi.

Ringing in 2015 with 40 Linux-friendly hacker SBCs (LinuxGizmos)

Posted Jan 6, 2015 17:09 UTC (Tue) by kjp (guest, #39639) [Link]

That looks cool, just a wildcard with the binary GPU driver. I see they published a unixbench of 622 (great magazine article on it they have, nice spec breakdown). I tested my ecs liva and got 1022. Of course its more expensive then 35, but came with storage and power adapter. No IR header though. Nice to see some competition.

Ringing in 2015 with 40 Linux-friendly hacker SBCs (LinuxGizmos)

Posted Jan 8, 2015 20:35 UTC (Thu) by pj (subscriber, #4506) [Link]

My usual trick is to go look on the openwrt compatibility list for the beefiest box they support, procure that, and put openwrt on it.

Ringing in 2015 with 40 Linux-friendly hacker SBCs (LinuxGizmos)

Posted Dec 31, 2014 23:04 UTC (Wed) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (3 responses)

I find I am unable to bring myself to buy a chip with PowerVR in it, even if I am only ever going to ssh in, so the rPi and clones are not an option. It's good to see so many alternatives. The Vivante and MALI VPU designs have what seem to be active reverse-engineering and driver-coding communities.

Ringing in 2015 with 40 Linux-friendly hacker SBCs (LinuxGizmos)

Posted Dec 31, 2014 23:25 UTC (Wed) by liam (guest, #84133) [Link]

RPI uses a broadcom GPU, iirc.
It's also getting an increasingly open source driver (, currently sits in user space with its own ogl stack, iirc), but already uses DRM/kms.

Ringing in 2015 with 40 Linux-friendly hacker SBCs (LinuxGizmos)

Posted Jan 1, 2015 1:25 UTC (Thu) by dbaker (guest, #89236) [Link]

Pi doesn't use PowerVR, it uses a Broadcom VC4. There is a gallium driver for it being sponsored by Broadcom (Eric Anholt, formerly of Intel) is doing the work.

This may be a little out of date: http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/VC4/

Ringing in 2015 with 40 Linux-friendly hacker SBCs (LinuxGizmos)

Posted Jan 1, 2015 2:43 UTC (Thu) by robclark (subscriber, #74945) [Link]

> I find I am unable to bring myself to buy a chip with PowerVR in it, even if I am only ever going to ssh in, so the rPi and clones are not an option. It's good to see so many alternatives. The Vivante and MALI VPU designs have what seem to be active reverse-engineering and driver-coding communities.

I'm a bit surprised no mention of any of the snapdragon boards in that article. They are, IMHO, are a pretty good choice if you want open src graphics (ofc, I am biased):

inforce ifc6410: http://inforcecomputing.com/products/moreinfo/inforce6410...

inforce ifc6540: http://inforcecomputing.com/products/moreinfo/inforce6540...

and, maybe a bit closer to a NUC than SBC, but also utilite2: http://www.compulab.co.il/utilite-computer/web/utilite2-o...

(there are a few other SOMs, the bStem board, etc for niche markets which I am leaving out)

The adreno a3xx support in upstream mesa is more mature than a4xx (ifc6540), but a4xx is progressing rapidly:
http://bloggingthemonkey.blogspot.com/2014/12/a4xx-in-hol...

------

Beyond those, if you care about graphics I'd recommend to stick with r-pi or devices such as freescale w/ vivante gpu at the lower end of the price/performance scale, or tegra jetson board (nouveau) at the high end. The etnaviv gallium driver (for vivante) is not upstream yet, but hopefully will be at some point during 2015.

Avoid powervr and mali at this point. Hopefully that changes at some point. At least a fair bit is understood about mali 4xx, so if you are motivated to write your own mesa driver, it might be an option.

Ringing in 2015 with 40 Linux-friendly hacker SBCs (LinuxGizmos)

Posted Jan 8, 2015 16:03 UTC (Thu) by bobsol (subscriber, #54641) [Link] (3 responses)

I am dismayed when x86 SBC's are not represented in SBC surveys.

PC Engines and Soekris have been producing these boards for many years. PC Engines APU and Soekris 6501 (more than twice as expensive as the APU) are worth a look.

Older products from from these suppliers have served me well as routers in production, one Soekris 4501? for about 10 years and two PC Engines ALIX for 4 and 5 years.

Ringing in 2015 with 40 Linux-friendly hacker SBCs (LinuxGizmos)

Posted Jan 9, 2015 12:37 UTC (Fri) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (2 responses)

The PC engines APU seems interesting! How is the support from the kernel and distributions? Can you assume everything will just work? Do they upstream everything?

Mageia doesn't do arm. The PC engines APU seems way more powerful than what I am after and as such the power usage seems a bit high. Still, I prefer being able to use my existing distribution.

My needs are pretty low, a mail server (incl spamassassin) and then some scripts linked to that which auto update Mageia packages (checks tarballs, doesn't build them).

Ringing in 2015 with 40 Linux-friendly hacker SBCs (LinuxGizmos)

Posted Jan 9, 2015 14:45 UTC (Fri) by bobsol (subscriber, #54641) [Link]

I am running an appliance on this board, so I am not speaking for experience.

I used to run OpenBSD on the Soekris 4501. Can't remeber how I installed but no modifications were necessary.

My impression is that these boards are designed from the ground up using linux and *bsd supported hardware, so there is no such thing as upstreaming.

Any distro that allows installation with with serial console should just install. Images are also available. Google shows reports of successful Debian and Ubuntu installs. TinyCore is known to install...

Ringing in 2015 with 40 Linux-friendly hacker SBCs (LinuxGizmos)

Posted Jan 11, 2015 22:03 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

The Soekris just works. Here and there things have been needed to be upstreamed -- this happens fairly fast. (The Soekris people themselves are largely BSD sorts, but there's good Linux support too.)

(this message brought to you via a Soekris net5501 plus lan1701.)