Ubuntu: A follow-up on 32-bit powerpc architecture

Posted Mar 18, 2017 13:05 UTC (Sat) by allesfresser (guest, #216)
In reply to: Ubuntu: A follow-up on 32-bit powerpc architecture by pizza
Parent article: Ubuntu: A follow-up on 32-bit powerpc architecture

Oh, I absolutely agree about wishing the Pi had better I/O channels (SATA, GigE, etc.) but for the low-cost education mission they designed it for, they've done a terrific job.

Ubuntu: A follow-up on 32-bit powerpc architecture

Posted Mar 18, 2017 18:47 UTC (Sat) by jch (guest, #51929) [Link] (5 responses)

There are a number of boards that have better I/O than the raspberry Pi, and run with few or no binary blobs. They usually don't have such an extensive and friendly community as the Pi, though, and they tend to have slower CPUs than the Pi 3.

If you want a kernel that's being actively maintained and a mostly free userspace (with the exception of some fairly exotic devel tools), the various BeagleBone variants are pretty nice — a single 100Gbit Ethernet phy on the base model, but directly attached to the SoC over GMII (the wireless models require a binary blob for the WiFi firmware). If you need gigabit Ethernet, Olimex are building some rather nice boards (e.g. the A20-Lime2). If you need more extensive networking but can manage without GPIOs, nothing can beat the mass-market routers that happen to be well supported by OpenWRT (the venerable WNDR3800 still being my favourite, but more recent models have vastly superior CPUs).

Ubuntu: A follow-up on 32-bit powerpc architecture

Posted Mar 18, 2017 22:54 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

My griping with the RPi has more to do with the fact that Broadcom has now released two significant updates to the SoC powering the thing, significant boosting the CPU capabilities and performance each time, but with essentially no change to rest of the SoC.

Sure, anything major would have resulted in something that's no longer [mostly] pin-compatible, but would it have really been that hard to replace the BM2385's afterthought-of-a-USB controller with something a bit less horrid? (...Especially given that Broadcom already has other USB controllers that are much, much more capable...)

OpenWRT device recommendation?

Posted Mar 20, 2017 21:03 UTC (Mon) by moxfyre (guest, #13847) [Link] (3 responses)

Do you have a particular OpenWRT-compatible device that you'd recommend for general hacking around with embedded Linux and networking as of 2017? Ideally something that is fast enough to keep up with 100 Mbps of aes128 (even better if hardware accelerated :-D).

I have an OpenWRT device but it's ancient and I'm having trouble figuring out what to replace it with.

OpenWRT device recommendation?

Posted Mar 22, 2017 1:18 UTC (Wed) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (2 responses)

PCEngines does embedded boards with hardware AES128 (Geodes and newer AMD chips). Enough to saturate the Ethernet/IDE interfaces, it's probably more bottlenecked by the RAM.

But given it's 2017, you should probably be considering updating your benchmarks for Chacha20, which is more than fast enough by your criteria (`openssl speed chacha20-poly1305` reports 35MB/s on a 1st-gen Atom). It's been the default cipher in OpenSSH for two years and a large chunk of the web uses it too — you're likely using it more than AES at this point.

OpenWRT device recommendation?

Posted Mar 23, 2017 13:38 UTC (Thu) by mstone_ (subscriber, #66309) [Link] (1 responses)

which is sad, since AES-NI assisted AES-GCM is an order of magnitude faster on modern CPUs

OpenWRT device recommendation?

Posted Mar 24, 2017 0:15 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

Faster, but given the ongoing tsunami of revelations about TLA agencies, is it such a good idea to outsource all security to a magic black box on the CPU?