[HN Gopher] The Banana Pi M7
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The Banana Pi M7
Author : rcarmo
Score : 34 points
Date : 2024-06-16 17:19 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (taoofmac.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (taoofmac.com)
| COGlory wrote:
| Is there any decent router software that will run on ARM? 2x2.5
| Gbe is tempting for that price.
| ftth_finland wrote:
| Why bother when you can get a complete X86 mini pc for less?
|
| Just pick up an N100 with 4x2.5G ports.
| rcarmo wrote:
| It depends. I am also testing N100 (and N97) machines, but
| for other reasons. Pricing will vary a lot depending on the
| number of interfaces, case, etc.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Most of the RK3588 boards I test support OpenWRT, and some are
| purpose-built for it.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| It's not that hard to manually make it a router by setting some
| sysctls and iptables rules.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > And yes, documentation and software support are still a bit of
| a mess, but that's par for the course with these boards-and the
| M7 is at least better supported than most.
|
| And that's why Raspberry Pi keeps winning:\
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| when even the very closed source pi wins, it shows the whole
| ecosystem is doomed.
|
| open source and open hardware lost.
| ahepp wrote:
| Open source software seems to be winning? I mean, the whole
| point is that people want SBCs running Linux.
|
| I think it's probably fair to say that open source hardware
| is not winning. I'm not sure I'd say it's "losing", the
| BeagleBoard exists and seems to do alright for itself if
| that's what you want.
| sqeaky wrote:
| When you say "closed source pi", are you referring to the
| hardware or the software that ships with? My experience with
| the Raspberry Pi is that it's been a very open platform and
| that there's tons of options for me and that licensing has
| never been a problem but also never tried to take a CPU off
| and Transplant it to a new board or something.
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| Pretty sure the issue is that the RK3588 drivers are not
| upstreamed into Linux/U-Boot etc. This is the issue with most
| ARM CPUs in this area like the Broadcom ones RPi is using.
| Which is why they have Raspberry Pi OS to ship you the
| drivers. The first good ARM CPU to actually get mainlined
| will probably see more sales.
|
| RK3588 upstreaming project: https://www.collabora.com/news-
| and-blog/blog/2024/02/21/almo...
|
| Risc-V JH7110[0] upsteam status:
| https://rvspace.org/en/project/JH7110_Upstream_Plan
|
| [0] used in https://www.starfivetech.com/en/site/boards
| asddubs wrote:
| hardware is closed source but in software the pi does open
| source better. they develop and mainline kernel drivers for
| their hardware
| rcarmo wrote:
| Well, I've had extremely good results with Armbian for server
| stuff, which is why I've always tried testing with that.
| Networking, standard peripherals, etc. all work, so the only
| real oddities are still GPU and specialized hardware support...
| bayindirh wrote:
| The problem with Armbian is, while it's neatly packed and
| made with a lot of care, you lose board-specific
| capabilities, esp. in Rockchip systems.
|
| Using Armbian for OrangePi 5B means losing hardware
| accelerated video encoding, AI acceleration, etc. But, I
| bought the board for these features.
|
| I'd either use OrangePi's own, short living Debian image with
| all the features or an Armbian build which I won't be able to
| update cross-release but will be supported and developed,
| losing all the differentiating features of the board.
|
| There's no winning here. This is why Raspberry Pi is winning.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Actually, the new Armbian releases do have GPU support (I
| mention that in my piece).
| bayindirh wrote:
| How about video encoding? I want to use mine as an on
| demand video encoder for a custom project.
| einsteinx2 wrote:
| Maybe try reading TFA? There's a whole section on
| transcoding.
| bayindirh wrote:
| The article states:
|
| Update: Like I mentioned above, in the weeks since I
| fleshed out this draft Armbian came out with an Ubuntu
| Noble version with improved MESA/VPU support, but I
| haven't had time to test it yet. I'll update this post
| when I do.
|
| Which is what I'm asking. The article doesn't contain
| information on media transcoding _with Armbian_ , and I
| asked the question to learn whether there is more info on
| that. Otherwise, OrangePi's image already does what I
| want.
|
| Video encoding has a lot of patents attached to it, so
| the access to that IP block is not always open source due
| to plethora of reasons. It's a very non-ideal situation
| for non-embedded use, hence the question.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Video transcoding already worked with the version I
| tested.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Thanks, that's great. I'll give it a go, then.
| rcarmo wrote:
| The Jellyfin version I tested comes with an ffmpeg build
| with RK3588 support.
| guccigav wrote:
| Is it just me or is there an influx of Raspberry Pi alternatives
| trending lately ever since the IPO?
| nineteen999 wrote:
| There has been a ton of them since the original Raspberry Pi
| was released .. both Banana Pi and Orange Pi first came out 10
| years ago, I think
| dekhn wrote:
| I've found with all the SBCs, the booting story is pretty sad. In
| particular, I've got a pile of more-or-less powerful but
| uninteresting SBCs (Raspberry Pis of multiple generations,
| OrangePi 5+, etc). I find that putting the OS on these machines
| is always quirky and failures to boot from SD are extremely hard
| to debug.
|
| From what I can tell these systems don't have a "BIOS" or UEFI or
| other bootloader that has a command line that supports USB
| keyboard, console display, and iterating over boot devices. TBH
| what I really want is an embedded copy of linux in an on-board
| firmware that boots me into a minimal filesystem with busybox-
| like toolkit, with the ability to use it to mount filesystem and
| boot a kernel from there.
|
| Maybe I'm missing this feature in OrangePi 5+ but a lot of my
| devices involve hooking up to a full monitor, a full keyboard,
| and then serially testing each of my SD cards until one can
| actually boot the OS. I much prefer my Intel NUCs (eveyrthing
| from the wimpiest to the most powerful) although Intel exited
| that business (IIRC they handed the NUC tech to Asus?).
| aseipp wrote:
| FWIW, there are working and usable ports of EDK2 to the RPi4
| (not sure about v5) so you can just throw the image on an
| attached USB drive. The FSBL then boots the EDK2 image, which
| can then load a generic UEFI image like normal. I used that
| reliably for quite a while; Fedora's generic UEFI aarch64 ISO
| worked out of the box with no extra fiddling, just burned it to
| a separate USB stick and booted the installer.
|
| There's also some in progress ports of EDK2 to RK3588, and
| various other boards, though there's often some missing
| features as they need to be implemented properly in EDK.
|
| Really, there's two parts to the whole story, the second being
| device enumeration, that gets handled by either a device tree
| blob (DTB) or via ACPI. For UEFI that means that either the
| UEFI build you're using needs to come with the DTBs pre-
| configured and embedded inside it so they can be passed to the
| OS you boot up. Or your device/build will be configured to use
| ACPI. (The story here is actually weirder than that on some
| devices where e.g. they have ACPI that requires enumeration,
| but they expose the actual raw DTBs from _that_ , which you
| then pass on to the kernel, so you actually have to handle
| both.)
|
| UBoot also has a minimal EFI implementation that you can use,
| though I don't know how much it implements or if a random
| generic AArch64 linux ISOs will work with it. Last I checked
| modern UBoot can even netboot over HTTPS these days, too, so if
| it could do all the above on a supported board, that would be
| awesome.
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| Would any of the tested smaller LLMs, be good for fixing
| grammatical and stylistic errors in emails? (Think Grammarly
| local.)
| rcarmo wrote:
| phi3:instruct does a good job with simple summarization. I
| haven't tested it for grammar checking (I am focusing on
| automation and tool use), but it would likely work.
| e12e wrote:
| Anyone know if the wifi6 support extend to hostapd? Can this be
| setup as a decent wifi router under Linux (or *bad)?
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