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.
BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux
271–280 of 311 posts
Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux
#272Is 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.
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
#273Can someone let me know, is there other use cases of such devices than prototyping/hobby?
Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux
#274Is 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.
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
#275Earlier 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
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
#276Is 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)
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
#277Is 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…
Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux
#278Earlier 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.
Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux
#279Is 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.
Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux
#280Earlier 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
Seems too late to edit now.