Radxa Dragon Q8B: A Laptop Cosplaying as an SBC?
bret.dk19 points by gainsurier 3 hours ago
19 points by gainsurier 3 hours ago
I want to be able to buy ARM boards like I'm buying ITX PC boards. I don't want a special build of Linux from the SBC OEM, I don't want weird bootloaders, firmware and other embedded-like stuff. I just want an ARM-based PC board for my desktop and server closet (so Ampere stuff is out of the picture unfortunately).
Qualcomm has been upstreaming kernel support for their chips recently, so I'm hopeful.
I hope Linux support for these chips matures quickly. Qualcomm's laptop chips are the only serious competitor to Apple's M-series in single core performance and power efficiency. Intel and AMD are both far behind.
I hope not just Linux support for these chips matures - but that the rest of the fabless chip vendors get a leg up as well, because .. The world needs non-Apple/-Qualcomm variants of this hardware architecture, imho.
Pretty darn quick.
If I could find a 6GB Q6A in stock (or Radxa eMMC, or fan-powered case, or most Radxa products in general) I would celebrate this announcement but they seem to be in small batch mode right now.
What would it cost to fund swe and design professionals to write a 9front port with a haiku skinjob to hit milestones at 9, 18, 27 month intervals? the incubation period for Macintosh, NeXTSTEP, BeOS, HarmonyOS Next would have estimates.
> What would it cost to fund swe and design professionals to write a 9front port with a haiku skinjob ...
Patches welcome. The community is very small and most everyone involved has jobs. There is also a tendency to only support the most common *useful* hardware instead of Raspberry Pi clone du jor.
As for a haiju skin job, see lola, a new window manager: https://shithub.us/aap/lola/HEAD/info.html I think it has a BeOS theme, if not, likely an easy patch because the dev designed it to be very hackable vs rio.
> ... to hit milestones at 9, 18, 27 month intervals? the incubation period for Macintosh, NeXTSTEP, BeOS, HarmonyOS Next would have estimates.
Not sure what any of this means. 9front is a rolling fork. People submit patches and if useful, are applied. sysupdate(8) is a small script that binds the 9front git repo over root and then runs git/pull. Then you run 'mk install' in /sys/src.
This is a one beautiful SBC.
Apparently we might be able to run OpenBSD on it [0]
FreeBSD is unclear [1]
- [0] https://www.openbsd.org/arm64.html
- [1] https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=267292
I just wish they had 2x5GbE like the Orion O6. i/o heavily matters for my compute nodes.
I wonder if 802.3ad bonding can bring 5gbit/s
It says that it has four 10 Gb/s USB ports (2 Type A and 2 Type C).
It is unknown whether the ports are independent, or some of them or all of them are connected to an internal hub.
Even if they were connected to a single CPU port through an internal hub, if you used two 5 Gb/s USB Ethernet interfaces you would get close to full speed for them.
Having 10 Gb/s USB instead of the so-called "5 Gb/s" USB (in reality 4 Gb/s), provides much more additional I/O throughput than having 5 Gb/s RJ45 instead of 2.5 Gb/s. I agree that having 5 Gb/s Ethernet would have been nice, but it is much more valuable that it has 10 Gb/s USB, which is very rarely encountered on Arm-based computers.
Seems like you could add that pretty easily via USB and/or M.2. Either should have the necessary bandwidth.