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BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

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271–280 of 311 posts

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The existence of Raspberry Pi as it is, Raspberry Pi 4 in parricular, is is a huge leap forward for the humanity already. The next leap is going to be the same kind of board but with no connectors besides an increasing number of full Thunderbolt 4 ports letting you connect anything you can imagine (incl as many GPIO connectors as you need). There is no need in a zoo of connectors like M.2, U.2, SATA, HDMI etc when we…

By the way, switching to a single super-fast (for the time) connector for everything (including internal hard drives) was already anticipated before the invention of SATA and even USB2 - FireWire (IEEE 1394) was meant for that.

Apple giveth. Apple taketh away.

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#272

Is there something inherently complicated in adding a SATA/M.2 port to board like this? The RaspberryPi is also "disk-less", which to me is one of the major limitations. It's a super interesting little board, and I love that it's a RISC-V, that could really help getting the CPU in the hands of people. I just don't know enough about these things to understand why there are no storage connectors (other than an SD card…

My pet peeve about all these small single board computers is that none of them have multiple ethernet ports, which severely limits their usefulness as networking hardware. They'd otherwise be very well suited to being various kinds of packet routing appliances. You can sometimes hang a usb ethernet dongle off them but performance on those tend to be somewhat limited.

I use consumer (Netgear) switches with VLAN support to enforce network separation.

The actual routing is done as a router-on-a-stick. It’s not perfect but it’s simple, scalable, and reliable.

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#274

Is there something inherently complicated in adding a SATA/M.2 port to board like this? The RaspberryPi is also "disk-less", which to me is one of the major limitations. It's a super interesting little board, and I love that it's a RISC-V, that could really help getting the CPU in the hands of people. I just don't know enough about these things to understand why there are no storage connectors (other than an SD card…

My pet peeve about all these small single board computers is that none of them have multiple ethernet ports, which severely limits their usefulness as networking hardware. They'd otherwise be very well suited to being various kinds of packet routing appliances. You can sometimes hang a usb ethernet dongle off them but performance on those tend to be somewhat limited.

Depending on your bandwidth (especially if you have an asymmetric connection like cable) using it as a router-on-a-stick with vlans should work.

On lower end hardware you'd probably get higher throughput over the single link than trying to add a USB LAN adapter to it.

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#275
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get an SD card with 0.5TB capacity on it for USD$30, what storage needs do you foresee? Also these tend to be used where weight is an issue, so, why do you want to lug around a huge disk?

Nearly all SD cards that I've used in Pis and other SBCs have died unpredictably in the past, so I've pretty much given up on using them

This seemed to be such a frequent problem that I have up on ARM SBCs (despite how cool they are).

Bought a cheap NUC with a disk and a BIOS and it is working like a champ - boots every time. I probably paid a little more but it's enough for my needs - a simple login and (occasional) DLNA server.

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#276

Is there something inherently complicated in adding a SATA/M.2 port to board like this? The RaspberryPi is also "disk-less", which to me is one of the major limitations. It's a super interesting little board, and I love that it's a RISC-V, that could really help getting the CPU in the hands of people. I just don't know enough about these things to understand why there are no storage connectors (other than an SD card…

https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unmatched PCIe, 16 GB DDR4, two M.2 (one for storage, one WIFI), quad core 1.5 GHz (same cores as this board, but twice as many)

Sensible spec. The price isn’t outlandish for what is basically a desktop with a relatively exotic CPU. 16GB ram is minimum for development in my view even though you can do a lot in 8GB.

I'm sure people would start comparing it pricewise to a i7 or something made at significant economies of scale. I think that is an unfair comparison due to the exotic CPU. Exotic in the sense that these aren't commodity CPUs.

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#277

Is there something inherently complicated in adding a SATA/M.2 port to board like this? The RaspberryPi is also "disk-less", which to me is one of the major limitations. It's a super interesting little board, and I love that it's a RISC-V, that could really help getting the CPU in the hands of people. I just don't know enough about these things to understand why there are no storage connectors (other than an SD card…

On the systems I can control, I do all work "disk-less". I strongly prefer it. I like to keep programs and data segregated. The basic setup on NetBSD is as follows, with endless variations possible therefrom. The kernel(s) and userland(s), along with bootloader(s), are on external media, like an SD card or USB stick, marked read-only. There's a RAM-disk in the kernel with a multi-call binary-based userland (custom-ma…

This is interesting setup. Do you know a good guide for such setup?

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nearly all SD cards that I've used in Pis and other SBCs have died unpredictably in the past, so I've pretty much given up on using them

This seemed to be such a frequent problem that I have up on ARM SBCs (despite how cool they are). Bought a cheap NUC with a disk and a BIOS and it is working like a champ - boots every time. I probably paid a little more but it's enough for my needs - a simple login and (occasional) DLNA server.

NUCs costs much more than Pi, even used.

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#279

Is there something inherently complicated in adding a SATA/M.2 port to board like this? The RaspberryPi is also "disk-less", which to me is one of the major limitations. It's a super interesting little board, and I love that it's a RISC-V, that could really help getting the CPU in the hands of people. I just don't know enough about these things to understand why there are no storage connectors (other than an SD card…

If you want sata then your best bet is probably the Intel NUC. Still fairly small but as powerful as your average laptop.

Aren't AMD NUCs supposed to be better now with Ryzen 2 and onward?

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OOM killer makes running out of memory on Linux not fun. I've found that turning of overcommit avoids this problem. Then again, I've seen BSDs handle it even worse.

"I've found that turning of overcommit avoids this problem." ("tuning of" or "turning off") Do you mean something like sysctl vm.overcommit_memory=2

I meant "turning off". Sorry. Yes, something exactly like that.

Seems too late to edit now.

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