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A comment on New Hardware from PINE64. Parent comment

Re:New Hardware from PINE64 by wang_li on Monday March 04, 2019 @11:15AM (#19302324)
The MACCHIATObin Double Shot[0] from Marvell is reasonably fast. CPU wise it's twice the speed of a RPI, has two 10 Gb NICs, one 1 Gb NIC, 3 SATA ports, a PCIe 3.0 x4 slot, in a mini-ITX form. I picked one up from Solid Run with 16 GB RAM for around $500 with the intention of making a desktop replacement to do all my online financial stuff on. Unfortunately the processor initialization doesn't configure large enough BAR space for video cards. A desktop like this has been done[1], but how was not publicly documented.

[0] http://macchiatobin.net/product/macchiatobin-double-shot/

[1] https://www.cnx-software.com/2017/10/03/macchiatobin-based-d...

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Re:New Hardware from PINE64 by floatboth on Monday March 04, 2019 @12:08PM (#19302816)
You should use the TianoCore based firmware instead of the U-Boot it comes with. TianoCore even runs QEMU to emulate the VBIOS, so you should be able to get graphics before OS boot, like on a normal PC :)

https://github.com/MarvellEmbeddedProcessors/edk2-open-platf...

How to compile: http://wiki.macchiatobin.net/tiki-index.php?page=Build+from+...

How to run without flashing: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-arm/2018-October... (at the bottom) (tl;dr the 'bubt' command)

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Re:New Hardware from PINE64 by wang_li on Monday March 04, 2019 @02:32PM (#19304465)
There are also jumpers for configuring where it gets the boot loader, so when I did happen to put a bad build into the SPI flash, it was possible to recover by using the SD card.

I'll have to revisit the TianoCore build as my previous attempts to use it were miserable failures. I assume due to the fact that my OS isn't arranged in such a way as to support EFI booting.

I would love to get it up and running as my gut feeling is that running on a platform that less than 0.0000001% of users are using insulates you from almost all automated attacks I'd encounter on the internet. The only thing I'd feel more secure using would be a Talos PowerPC based system, but those are out of my budget.

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