On Tue, 29 Oct 2013 18:17:34 +0000 peter green <plugwash@p10link.net> wrote: > > 2. The board is missing a SATA connector. The internal eMMC is far > > to slow for speedy sw development. > There is USB3 which should in theory give you fast storage, the > question is will it be fast and stable in practice. > > Does anyone know if the reason for the lack of SATA is because the > SoC doesn't have it, because the vendors can't be bothered including > it or some other reason? I've been using SSD over USB3 on a chromebook (again exynos5 based) for almost a year now and it's been rock solid (admittedly using a chromeos kernel). I've been doing compiles on it and it's much faster than both the quad odroid-x (sans SATA, usb2) or the sabrelite quad mx6 (SATA-1 only). In terms of performance, hdparm -t gives me ~69MB/s vs 28MB/s on the internal eMMC (yes I know hdparm is not a real benchmark, but it's an indication). kernel compiles happen quite fast and the system running Debian unstable has been quite solid for me for the past year. I intended to get one of the XUs myself and was actually wondering if it would be worth to do a bulk order for some developers (maybe getting a discount and maybe use some of the Debian funds for this purchase). If people are more keen on getting arndale's instead, I'd be willing to go that route as well, get one board and try to support it as best we can in Debian. I would personally suggest using such systems (Arndales/XUs)as official buildds even if there is no mainline support, or at least evaluating them. I know some people prefer real "server" class ARM hardware, but I'd rather have something that is cheap and easily replaceable (so we can preorder spare boards even) even if it's not fully supported in mainline, rather than a $7k hard-to-get server class board that is mainlined. For the record, the official buildds didn't have mainline support originally, that only came some time afterwards, and originally I did built the whole of armhf natively on a bunch of Efikas which weren't supported in mainline at all -and still aren't. Bottom line: mainline support is great to have, but should not be a showstopper and with 3/7 buildds out of order and the other 4 struggling to build huge packages taking many days even, I'd suggest we make a decision to replace them sooner rather than later. Regards Konstantinos
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