Re:Raspberry Pi 4 PCIe bridge “chip”
by kelnos on Thursday July 02, 2020 @12:23AM
(#23710003)
I've looked at a few of the other Pi-like SBCs out there that have beefier hardware features, and the one question I can't find an answer to is: how well is it supported, and what happens if the company that makes it disappears?
With the RPi, I know that enough stuff is upstreamed that even if the RPi Foundation were to dissolve, I could still run a stock Debian with a stock kernel on it and get most of the functionality working (where in my case, "most" is everything that I personally have a need for). While the RPi isn't 100% open hardware-wise (stupid Broadcom), the stuff that is open is good enough for me.
But I don't know how to get similar confidence about NanoPi, RockPi, OrangePi, CubieBoard, etc. How open is the hardware? Is support for everything I need upstreamed? What's the community like? A cursory look at their various websites didn't give me enough information to feel comfortable trying one out. I have a limited amount of time for this stuff, and I'd like to have a pretty high level of confidence before buying one.
I'll admit that my hesitance is maybe a little unfair and colored by a single bad experience: a few years ago I bought a ReSpeaker (the original v1 hardware). It was, frankly, garbage. The hardware itself was designed poorly and was buggy (attempting to run anything off the SD card would result in random no-reason SIGILL/SIGBUS/SIGSEGV, for one thing; that's a sign of broken hardware design). Support was minimal[0], and after they started working on the v2 hardware, they more or less stopped caring about v1. I actually threw the board away because it was useless. I wasted a good 20+ hours trying to get the ReSpeaker to do something useful, and I'm never getting that time back. I don't want a repeat.
In contrast, the RPi has always been a reliable platform to build on, with a great, responsive community.
[0] And the only suggestion was "only run things off the built-in flash"... which, IIRC, was double-digit-megabyte tiny.
With the RPi, I know that enough stuff is upstreamed that even if the RPi Foundation were to dissolve, I could still run a stock Debian with a stock kernel on it and get most of the functionality working (where in my case, "most" is everything that I personally have a need for). While the RPi isn't 100% open hardware-wise (stupid Broadcom), the stuff that is open is good enough for me.
But I don't know how to get similar confidence about NanoPi, RockPi, OrangePi, CubieBoard, etc. How open is the hardware? Is support for everything I need upstreamed? What's the community like? A cursory look at their various websites didn't give me enough information to feel comfortable trying one out. I have a limited amount of time for this stuff, and I'd like to have a pretty high level of confidence before buying one.
I'll admit that my hesitance is maybe a little unfair and colored by a single bad experience: a few years ago I bought a ReSpeaker (the original v1 hardware). It was, frankly, garbage. The hardware itself was designed poorly and was buggy (attempting to run anything off the SD card would result in random no-reason SIGILL/SIGBUS/SIGSEGV, for one thing; that's a sign of broken hardware design). Support was minimal[0], and after they started working on the v2 hardware, they more or less stopped caring about v1. I actually threw the board away because it was useless. I wasted a good 20+ hours trying to get the ReSpeaker to do something useful, and I'm never getting that time back. I don't want a repeat.
In contrast, the RPi has always been a reliable platform to build on, with a great, responsive community.
[0] And the only suggestion was "only run things off the built-in flash"... which, IIRC, was double-digit-megabyte tiny.