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Re: Is an ARM computer a good choice? Which one?



On 3/21/23 12:11, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
On Tue, Mar 21, 2023 at 11:59:08AM +0100, Lionel Élie Mamane wrote:
On Tue, Mar 21, 2023 at 08:33:26AM +0000, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:

If you can get a Raspberry Pi 4 - it woill work as a small desktop,
more or less silently. To fit extra disks you'll need an add on case
- something like the Argon which will take NVME. There are
bottlenecks. It's still essentially a phone SOC. It's not *free*
because blobs and if you want peripherals, you more or less are tied
to running Raspberry Pi OS.

What ties me into Raspberry Pi OS for peripherals? Non-free drivers
and/or firmware that cannot get into Debian, or just "it is not
packaged for Debian because nobody did the work but could be"?


The Raspberry Pi packaged kernel and dtb and the Pi "hat" ecosystem.

The peripheral drivers thing is particularly annoying because the dtb's
are not that much - I have a GPS hat for which there is no obvious
driver except in Raspberry Pi forked kernel, for example.

I'm in a similar situation: I'm using SPI to talk to a peripheral, and the Raspberry Pi's SPI master is not available in Debian because of missing DTB support (the kernel driver is there but the hardware is disabled by the stock kernel.org DTB).

Both Raspberry Pi OS and Ubuntu ship updated (optional) DTBs that enable the SPI port.


--
Sebastian Kuzminsky


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