On 2021-06-05 15:04:45 +0300 (+0300), Andrei POPESCU wrote:
[...]
> For a cheap board now I'd probably go for a ROCK64 (USB3 instead
> of USB2), or even a RockPro64 (better CPU, PCIe, unfortunately
> limited to 4 GB RAM).
>
> Heating could also be an issue under load, so you should consider
> getting at least a passive heat sink as well, just in case.
I have a number of the Radxa Rock Pro boards I used for years
in my own makeshift netbooks and as embedded low-power servers (all
running Jessie and, then-testing, Stretch/Sid), and they do work
great (I didn't add any heatsinks, for what it's worth). They're
aging now, but being quad-core at 1.6GHz and having 2GB of rather
fast RAM made them quite performant at the time they originally
shipped. Also plenty of storage if you crammed a large enough µSD
card in it.
The vendor seemed dedicated to trying to upstream all the relevant
drivers for the RK3188 SOC in Linux, but as time went on that effort
stalled and I was only ever able to use much of the onboard
components with kernel patches which went unmaintained and meant
being stuck on increasingly outdated kernel versions. I suppose it's
worth dusting one of these off and revisiting the state of modern
kernels for RK3188-based systems.
These were great little boards though, and I loved that they had
published schematics, parts diagrams, et cetera. They really got
behind the (at the time, fledgling) OSHW movement:
https://github.com/radxa/oshw/tree/master/rock_pro
Definitely worth checking out.
--
Jeremy Stanley
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