SBC / Low Power boards general - Raspberry Pi and what not

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"Panthor" DRM Driver Coming Together For Newer Arm Mali GPUs
The initial Panthor driver development has been focused on enabling the GPU of the Rockchip RK3588, which features a Mali-G610 MC4 GPU. The Panthor DRM driver is designed from the start to support modern Vulkan API needs like sparse memory bindings.

Besides the Panthor DRM kernel driver, there is this Mesa merge request for supporting this new driver and the Mali v10/CSF hardware by the Panfrost Gallium3D driver and PanVK Vulkan driver.
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I bought an RK3328 based SBC a while back because the price and size were right, but that little fucker runs hot, like really fucking hot. The cooling "solution" the SBC ships with is absolutely not sufficient and leaves it idling in the 65-75C range.

The heat sink really is not big enough, but I replaced the thermal pad with paste and added a small fan and that was enough to get it under 50C at idle, so a pretty significant improvement. At some point I'd like to stick a much bigger heat sink on it, but that's a project for another day.
 
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I really hate to say this, but the M2/M2Pro Mac Mini is a really nice homelab box if all you are running is a video surveillance server, some random workloads, grafana and a test env of some kind. It's pretty small, silent, low power and can run headless or with a KVM (PiKVM would be the giga-based option or Raritan if you are like Hetzner, those guys run hundreds)
 
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AmpleApricots said:
What's a current ARM SoC in linux that's actually well supported? With that I mean mainline kernel, no random patches from random githubs? Hell, let's throw in GPU support. Where are we at right now?
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The raspberry pi will always have the best support due to the sheer number of people and companies using them. It's worth banging your head against a wall trying to get a 5 at a non-scalped price.

Or get a 4 on eBay, they're pretty cheap secondhand now that supply caught up. If you need more power than the 4 you probably aren't picking the right device for what you're doing.
 
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Polarity said:
If you need more power than the 4 you probably aren't picking the right device for what you're doing.
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Remember the Jetson family of SBC boards and full devkits exist if you have too much money. Put simply: This is a Raspberry Pi on Russian steroids.
Ideally you would not need one unless you are either doing a lot of integer math, punching polygons or making sense of video with CV or some AI shenanigans.
jetson.jpg
 
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AmpleApricots said:
What's a current ARM SoC in linux that's actually well supported? With that I mean mainline kernel, no random patches from random githubs? Hell, let's throw in GPU support. Where are we at right now?
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The Raspberry Pi series and that's basically fucking it. Which is why the Pi Foundation has gotten away with making lackluster shit. If they had any real competition someone would have already eaten their lunch after the 3b series.

Which, not to derail the thread too much, is yet one more example of the Linux community STILL having its collective head up its wizard-nerd ass.
 
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lizardwizard said:
I think they should make poe standard on raspberry pi's. It'd up the cost but evidently it seems they dont really care about that at this point
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I don't think it's the cost, it's the giant amount of board space for the transformer/inductors.

Speaking of that, where is the official Pi 5 POE hat anyway...

Probably a similar reason they didn't just do Proper USB-C and make it 12V.
 
davids877 said:
I don't think it's the cost, it's the giant amount of board space for the transformer/inductors.
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Thats fair, although some of the third party POE modules are pretty small, like the waveshare hat. And yeah to be honest, i think the size restrictions have fucked them over in the power delivery department as a whole
 
lizardwizard said:
Thats fair, although some of the third party POE modules are pretty small, like the waveshare hat. And yeah to be honest, i think the size restrictions have fucked them over in the power delivery department as a whole
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I have a waveshare HAT for my Pi; the official drivers don't work and the customer support is a joke. Anyone who can make them work or patch them to work please let me know.
 
I did a little bit of my own research because I used to own an Odroid N2 (not plus) and apparently the Amlogic S922X is well supported now, graphics and everything. This was the little ARM chip that made me swear off ARM in linux forever. Would still be quite decent (for me, YMMV) in daily driving if it wasn't for the 4 GB of RAM max. that SoC supports.

The RK3558 seems very tempting on paper and some of the board designs that allow for nvme drives could easily compete with the N100 performance-wise while consuming about half the electricity. The only downside is that it's apparently more or less vendor kernel right now, which is some ancient 5.10.x and from what people say online, even that is kind of a mess. There's been big steps in mainlining the chip though and it might actually happen. They used to say that about the S922X but development was molasses and after a while I just gave up, and then it apparently did happen in the end so I guess wonders happen sometimes.

Is it still just as good as some low end x86 where everything just works? I guess not.
 
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AmpleApricots said:
The RK3558 seems very tempting on paper and some of the board designs that allow for nvme drives could easily compete with the N100 performance-wise while consuming about half the electricity. The only downside is that it's apparently more or less vendor kernel right now, which is some ancient 5.10.x and from what people say online, even that is kind of a mess. There's been big steps in mainlining the chip though and it might actually happen. They used to say that about the S922X but development was molasses and after a while I just gave up, and then it apparently did happen in the end so I guess wonders happen sometimes.

Is it still just as good as some low end x86 where everything just works? I guess not.
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That's the way it's going to be. Sensational overhyped Chinese ARM chip launches (RK3588 was very late bc of chip shortage), looks great on paper, maybe it's well supported 4 years later.

Intel is barely even trying and they are the obvious choice for sub-$200 PCs. Alder Lake-N has single-channel memory, unlike Jasper Lake. The big seller is the N100 which has half the CPU cores and 1/3 of the GPU disabled. If they sold the i3-N305 cheaper or made a 6-core, it would look even better.
 
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Yeah, I'm not averse to tinkering at all and I have accepted hardware to need binary blobs because all common GPUs have and need them anyways but the mess that seems to surround the rk3588 vendor kernel gave me pause. One issue spoke of the SoC always sitting on almost exactly 1 load average and obviously getting hot. How the hell does that even happen?

The Mass Shooter Ron Soye said:
Intel
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There's also so much used stuff that its perfectly viable. My main browsing machine/terminal to the world is a Thinkpad X1 Tablet I have on a stand and put a nice keyboard in front of. It only got a Kaby Lake i5-7y57. The screen is 2160x1440 which at 12" is over 200 PPI, so it's very sharp, although to be honest the colors could be better. The fun thing is it's all in one package, the PC is in the screen. Wouldn't wanna use it as a tablet which is the original idea, amazing "mini-PC" though, and fanless to boot.

Since my more powerful desktop is going to be replaced by a on-demand GPU-server, I wanted to upgrade a little (honestly only a little, I'm not missing much) which would involve buying a 16" amoled screen and I would've liked to stay in the power consumption bracket of the thinkpad (~18W max. with screen, which I think will probably not be doable with such a relatively big oled) complete with fanlessness and similar power footprint and I wanted to see what was possible with ARM now but just like the many years before, it's always *almost* there but not *quite*, so very frustrating. I think It'll never change.
 
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AmpleApricots said:
What's a current ARM SoC in linux that's actually well supported? With that I mean mainline kernel, no random patches from random githubs? Hell, let's throw in GPU support. Where are we at right now?
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Armbian lists their supported devices sorted by support tier. I have the M2S (platinum support) and a 322x-box (community/unofficial support only). Both are very mainline in terms of kernel. Both work quite well.


There are other distroes that work (even better, I reckon, in their ways) but I do Armbian and RPi OS.
 
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I have an old odroid SBC with a 32-bit CPU. I think I got it back in 2019-ish? Anyways, I am quite amazed at the work I can put onto that old dust collector:

0) insert 1 TB HDD that was laying around on it
1) install dietpi OS
2) enable debian testing (trixie) repos
3) `sudo apt install qbittorrent-nox i2pd`
4) Turn it into an I2P floodfill router
5) Seed and leech movies and series over the I2P network via qbittorrent
6) `sudo apt install kodi`
7) Reach my 1 TB media library in the house network from the TV, the Desktop computer, etc., "kodi-n-chill"

The SBC has been running non-stop over the years. I am really pleasantly surprised at the work-horse that my odroid has become and is still pulling.
 
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