6 comments

  • avhception 22 minutes ago
    I want to be able to buy ARM boards like I'm buying ITX PC boards. I don't want a special build of Linux from the SBC OEM, I don't want weird bootloaders, firmware and other embedded-like stuff. I just want an ARM-based PC board for my desktop and server closet (so Ampere stuff is out of the picture unfortunately).
    • preisschild 2 minutes ago
      Yeah, I want edk2 uefi and mainline linux support at least for most functions (dont care about npu for example)
      • modeless 11 minutes ago
        Qualcomm has been upstreaming kernel support for their chips recently, so I'm hopeful.
      • modeless 53 minutes ago
        I hope Linux support for these chips matures quickly. Qualcomm's laptop chips are the only serious competitor to Apple's M-series in single core performance and power efficiency. Intel and AMD are both far behind.
        • rigonkulous 22 minutes ago
          I hope not just Linux support for these chips matures - but that the rest of the fabless chip vendors get a leg up as well, because .. The world needs non-Apple/-Qualcomm variants of this hardware architecture, imho.

          Pretty darn quick.

          • jauntywundrkind 52 minutes ago
            Yes! But these are rebadged 5 year old chips.
          • mrbluecoat 56 minutes ago
            If I could find a 6GB Q6A in stock (or Radxa eMMC, or fan-powered case, or most Radxa products in general) I would celebrate this announcement but they seem to be in small batch mode right now.
            • __patchbit__ 1 hour ago
              What would it cost to fund swe and design professionals to write a 9front port with a haiku skinjob to hit milestones at 9, 18, 27 month intervals? the incubation period for Macintosh, NeXTSTEP, BeOS, HarmonyOS Next would have estimates.
              • MisterTea 1 hour ago
                > What would it cost to fund swe and design professionals to write a 9front port with a haiku skinjob ...

                Patches welcome. The community is very small and most everyone involved has jobs. There is also a tendency to only support the most common *useful* hardware instead of Raspberry Pi clone du jor.

                As for a haiju skin job, see lola, a new window manager: https://shithub.us/aap/lola/HEAD/info.html I think it has a BeOS theme, if not, likely an easy patch because the dev designed it to be very hackable vs rio.

                > ... to hit milestones at 9, 18, 27 month intervals? the incubation period for Macintosh, NeXTSTEP, BeOS, HarmonyOS Next would have estimates.

                Not sure what any of this means. 9front is a rolling fork. People submit patches and if useful, are applied. sysupdate(8) is a small script that binds the 9front git repo over root and then runs git/pull. Then you run 'mk install' in /sys/src.

              • sunshine-o 1 hour ago
                This is a one beautiful SBC.

                Apparently we might be able to run OpenBSD on it [0]

                FreeBSD is unclear [1]

                - [0] https://www.openbsd.org/arm64.html

                - [1] https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=267292

                • preisschild 1 hour ago
                  I just wish they had 2x5GbE like the Orion O6. i/o heavily matters for my compute nodes.

                  I wonder if 802.3ad bonding can bring 5gbit/s

                  • adrian_b 48 minutes ago
                    It says that it has four 10 Gb/s USB ports (2 Type A and 2 Type C).

                    It is unknown whether the ports are independent, or some of them or all of them are connected to an internal hub.

                    Even if they were connected to a single CPU port through an internal hub, if you used two 5 Gb/s USB Ethernet interfaces you would get close to full speed for them.

                    Having 10 Gb/s USB instead of the so-called "5 Gb/s" USB (in reality 4 Gb/s), provides much more additional I/O throughput than having 5 Gb/s RJ45 instead of 2.5 Gb/s. I agree that having 5 Gb/s Ethernet would have been nice, but it is much more valuable that it has 10 Gb/s USB, which is very rarely encountered on Arm-based computers.

                    • HeyMeco 34 minutes ago
                      They’re independent
                    • modeless 48 minutes ago
                      Seems like you could add that pretty easily via USB and/or M.2. Either should have the necessary bandwidth.
                      • preisschild 7 minutes ago
                        I would use the m.2 e keys for sata and x4 m key for nvme ssds. That only leaves pcie gen3 x2.

                        I want to run a distributed network storage (ceph)