On 2016-05-19, peter green wrote:
> I'm looking for an arm board/box to add to my collection of buildboxes.
>
> Critera (in roughly descending order of importance):
>
> Reasonablly affordable (upper limit ~£200)
> As much ram as possible.
> Plenty of CPU power would be nice.
> A good storage interface (in order of preference SATA is better than
> USB3 which is better than USB2).
> Support in Debian kernels would be nice.
> arm64 support would be nice.
The LeMaker Cello looks promising, but isn't shipping yet. It is a
little out of the price range you're talking about (US$299 + cost of ram
and other accessories). It has dual sata, installable ram, and mainline
support seems plausible (other similar boards have pretty full
support, from what I can see).
> Currently looking at the cubox i4x4. Anyone have any other suggestions?
Some brief comparisons follow of the best perfoming boards used in the
reproducible builds network. Most only have 2GB of ram, none are arm64
capable, all are running armhf, most are supported to some degree by
debian kernel and u-boot. Builds is average number of package builds
per day (multiple entries for multiple boards). Prices may vary
presently, but most were purchased within the last year.
It seems like the best performance vs. price comparison is with the
Odroid-XU4, if you can bear only 2GB of RAM and a noisy fan.
Cubox-i4x4:
price: ~US$180
kernel: 3.16.x in jessie
cpu: quad-core cortex-a9 (freescale imx6)
ram: 3.8GB
disk: eSATA
u-boot: vendor or patched u-boot to use 3.8GB of ram.
builds: 180, 187
Cubox-i4pro:
price: ~US$150?
kernel: 3.16.x in jessie
u-boot: 2014.10 in jessie
cpu: quad-core cortex-a9 (freescale imx6)
ram: 2gb
disk: eSATA
builds: 166
Firefly-4GB:
price: ~US$260
kernel: 4.6.x in experimental (4.4.x worked fine, but 4.5.x broke
ethernet).
cpu: quad-core cortex-a12?/a17? (Rockchip rk3288)
ram: 4GB
disk: USB2
u-boot: patched u-boot 2016.01 to recognize 4GB of ram
builds: 182
Firefly-2GB:
price: ~US$160
kernel: 4.6.x in experimental (4.4 worked fine, but 4.5 broke
ethernet).
cpu: quad-core cortex-a12?/a17? (Rockchip rk3288)
ram: 2GB
disk: USB2
u-boot: 2016.03 in stretch (2016.05 currently does not load boot
kernel successfully)
builds: 165, 158
Odroid-XU4:
price: ~US$80-90
kernel: 4.5.x in jessie-backports
cpu: octa-core 4 x cortex-a15, 4 x cortex-a7 (Exynos 5422)
ram: 2gb
u-boot: 2016.05 in experimental
disk: USB3
builds: 201, 181, 168
notes: noisy fan
BeagleBoard-X15:
price: not yet available, estimated ~US$239
kernel: 4.6.x, currently needs custom kernel with compiled-in sata
cpu: dual-core cortex-a15 (TI AM57xx)
ram: 2gb
disk: eSATA
u-boot: 2016.03 in stretch
builds: 179
notes: noisy fan
Wandboard quad:
price: ~US$160
kernel: 3.16.x in jessie
u-boot: 2014.10 in jessie
cpu: quad-core cortex-a9 (freescale imx6)
ram: 2gb
disk: SATA
builds: 188
Orange pi plus 2:
price: ~US$50-60
kernel: custom patched 4.4-rc6
u-boot: 2016.03 in stretch
cpu: quad-core cortex-a7 (allwinner H3)
ram: 2gb
disk: SATA, but over USB2
builds: 154, 148
Builds per day derived from:
https://jenkins.debian.net/view/reproducible/job/reproducible_nodes_info/lastBuild/console
live well,
vagrant
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