Comment by avhception
4 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).
I bought a Radxa Cubie A7A over the weekend because my homelab machine of 5 months threw an SSD and I wanted something to limp along with while I wait for a replacement. I was a bit nervous about the special builds, driver issues, etc but didn't really run into any significant issues (or if I did, Claude took them in stride). And it was a very good test of the Ansible Playbook I'd thrown together over time to rebuild the system from scratch. Was missing a number of small things, but it should be rock solid by the time (if) the other company gets a new drive to me.
asrockrack has some ampere boards, in CEB and MicroATX iirc
The O6 runs mainline pretty good, only hiccups I know of are gpu acceleration and the npu.
Qualcomm has been upstreaming kernel support for their chips recently, so I'm hopeful.
It seems they've been stopping short of completion. Once the next gen chip is released, they are done and stop working on fixing issues.
Hopefully, with some time this gets better as it's not like they have to start from scratch with each generation. But it does leave a sour taste in my mouth that they quit so early before finishing.
preach. and i want this to extend to phones too.
Yeah, I want edk2 uefi and mainline linux support at least for most functions (dont care about npu for example)
Why would you ask for a pony and then only want half? Let's get mainline support for all functions, like the NPU.
Having a (somewhat) usable mainline linux sbc would already be a big improvement over the status quo