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Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by u678u on Friday March 12, 2021 @11:35AM (#26437576)
If rpis had m2 built into the card it would be the premier ARM platform right now. Its so fast many people could use as their main desktop.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by mikece on Friday March 12, 2021 @03:10PM (#26440309)
I reading an article recently that if Microsoft really wanted to make Windows on ARM64 take off they should sell a "developer machine" like a Raspberry Pi 4 with Windows ARM64 preinstalled for $199. If such a machine had an M.2 drive as an option (microSD or eMMC default) I suspect it would be a huge hit.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by mike_d on Friday March 12, 2021 @03:24PM (#26440443)
They don't sell them directly, but Microsoft maintains a list of boards you should buy (probably as close to "Windows Certified" as you'll get for small batch boards).

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot-core/tutorials/...

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by wmf on Friday March 12, 2021 @04:07PM (#26440934)
Does IoT Core run a full desktop?
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by HeyLaughingBoy on Friday March 12, 2021 @05:53PM (#26441940)
Well, Windows 10 IoT will run on a pi 3, but I don't recommend it. It works well enough, but it seems to have been abandoned by Microsoft, so it's doubtful there will be any updates.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by TaylorAlexander on Friday March 12, 2021 @06:15PM (#26442120)
Seems like a great way to attract people to linux. “Hey I know windows so I can get a raspberry pi and try that.” Then “wow this doesn’t run very well. I guess I should try raspbian...”
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by diarrhea on Friday March 12, 2021 @04:51PM (#26441409)
Wait, a 4 times markup for having Windows installed? That doesn't compute.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by intrasight on Friday March 12, 2021 @12:00PM (#26437902)
Really hoping that the RPi 5 has this. Combined with presumably improved overall performance, it would be a game changer. I don't think it makes sense to fork a 'pro model'. Probably cheaper overall to just add it the regular model.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by yjftsjthsd-h on Friday March 12, 2021 @12:08PM (#26437994)
That and preferably default UEFI; you can already use a third-party version on whatever your boot device is, but sticking in a tiny bit of on-board storage and flashing UEFI firmware at the factory would let us finally not need pi-specific images
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by inetknght on Friday March 12, 2021 @12:20PM (#26438163)
> flashing UEFI firmware at the factory

The factory can already flash the pi firmware. What does UEFI solve here?

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by yjftsjthsd-h on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:51PM (#26439377)
It means that I can download a generic aarch64 OS image instead of needing the special pi image that knows how to work with its nonstandard boot sequence.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by frabert on Friday March 12, 2021 @12:43PM (#26438478)
Presumably it provides a standardized boot process for other non-RPi specific ARM OSs
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Friday March 12, 2021 @12:20PM (#26438158)
They are the premier ARM platform anyway, but the real problem is that a 5W CPU is too slow to work with, unless you write everything minimalistic from scratch!
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by jandrese on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:57PM (#26439466)
It really depends what you're doing. The 5W CPU in the Pi is more than adequate for a lot of tasks. Heck, I wrote papers using Libreoffice on the original model Pi.

The Pi4 is powerful enough to run web browsers comfortably, which was a problem on the original Pi. Office programs run no sweat. You can even do light development work.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by 72deluxe on Friday March 12, 2021 @02:38PM (#26439962)
Yes I have switched to using a Pi4 8GB as a desktop machine running WindowMaker and it's speedy as can be. Am using a USB3 SSD but booting from /boot on the SD card, which then loads the main system from the SSD. Can happily do C++ work on it or RDP to a Windows machine.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by posterboy on Friday March 12, 2021 @12:33PM (#26438316)
Millions of smartphones running on ARM would disagree.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:04PM (#26438758)
I meant work as in compiling work, when you are used to 65W X86 the ARMs stand no chance. My 3D MMO engine compiles in 2 seconds on my Windows PC but it takes 10 seconds on Raspberry/Jetson, enough that I decided to build a 45W Atom computer to try the inbetween... with 25W CPU and 20W GPU!

Even if that would mean I have to "port" the engine to linux/X86. Until now I just had windows/X86 and linux/ARM!

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by xmodem on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:12PM (#26438843)
> when you are used to 65W X86 the ARM stand no chance.

My m1 mac says hi! :)

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:18PM (#26438928)
Yes, it says hi and then when you want to upgrade the disk/RAM you can't. And when it breaks you can't fix it and Apple sells you another one for bazillion dollars. And you have to use Metal instead of OpenGL. That's when I say goodbye until they reverse engineer the GPU and port OpenGL to it! :D

Now I didn't even mention the App store tie in and how you need to sign the binaries on Apple hardware and how they poach 30%, but you get the picture.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by antiterra on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:35PM (#26439149)
You just moved the goalposts to another planet. Your initial comment was about wattage and ARM performance.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by kube-system on Friday March 12, 2021 @02:39PM (#26439976)
Not to mention that plenty of x86 hardware has also ditched socketed components.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by lostlogin on Friday March 12, 2021 @02:00PM (#26439490)
> And when it breaks you can't fix it and Apple sells you another one for bazillion dollars.

I’f you’re lucky enough to live in a country with consumer protection laws (NZ is one), Apple will fix if for you for 3-4 years. So you pay the fortune you mention and then a bit more to cover this feature.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by nkellenicki on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:43PM (#26439253)
None of that is even remotely related to your initial point.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by lucian1900 on Friday March 12, 2021 @02:51PM (#26440112)
OpenGL is a legacy API. Metal, Vulkan and Direct3D 12 are the APIs that can actually saturate modern hardware.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Friday March 12, 2021 @03:16PM (#26440375)
Really those APIs bring nothing useful to the table.

OpenGL (ES) 3 with VAO was the last feature that really moved any interesting goalpost (to reuse that phrasing since we have a tree structured comment field to move those around) for games.

Most new protocols are just job security.

Edit: Also calling something that just released in hardware (OpenGL ES 3) legacy is kinda weird.

Maybe wait a decade or two?

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by lucian1900 on Friday March 12, 2021 @03:23PM (#26440432)
Performance is very useful. OpenGL’s design precludes it.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Friday March 12, 2021 @03:54PM (#26440778)
Now I can reply to your comment (what is going on hn, why is there a timer on the reply button the deeper you get?)

Performance with the low level APIs are not something that competes with OpenGLs higher level API, they are complementary; eventually there will be OpenGL drivers written in Vulkan!

That said, I have yet to meet anyone that can give me a practial example that affects gameplay where Vulkan (or Metal/DX12) makes a difference!

Also last but not least fragmentation is bad, I rather support OpenGL (ES) 3 on all platforms than port to those 3 new APIs.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by the-dude on Friday March 12, 2021 @04:37PM (#26441284)
Timing is what is going on. If you want to reply directly, click the timestamp.

edit: the timer is there probably for flamewar prevention. Maybe for general discussion quality too.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by lucian1900 on Friday March 12, 2021 @07:44PM (#26442784)
Sure, OpenGL can be implemented on top of the native efficient APIs.

The biggest problem with OpenGL is the state. It severely affects CPU usage and limits parallelism options. The second problem is poor handling of buffers.

It hardly matters, anyway. Vulkan, D3D 12 and Metal are very similar and almost always used indirectly through a game engine that can take advantage of them.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Saturday March 13, 2021 @04:31AM (#26445283)
I'm writing my own 3D MMO engine from scratch, so it does matter to me: http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=5959519327505901449

Unity and Unreal are so bad. I mean compile for 30 minutes? To use them is to have technical debt way beyond what is healthy.

So why can't you make OpenGL stateless? It seems to me multithreading is really bad on the new APIs too, you'll have to trash memory with a bunch of buffers that then gets submitted by one thread causing motion to photon latency!

RdR2 had like 10 frames of lag! Completely unplayable.

I prefer direct/forward rendering one one thread and make the graphics simpler instead. Graphical fidelity is not important to make a fun game, just look at Nintendo.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by lucian1900 on Saturday March 13, 2021 @02:19PM (#26449128)
If your graphics are atypically simple, it hardly matters.

For the vast majority of games that compete on graphics, you need to use modern APIs to take advantage of modern GPUs.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Saturday March 13, 2021 @04:06PM (#26449985)
Sure, but I also out-scale all other engines both server and client:

http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=579711216639635462

My server is the first MMO system to handle 10.000 concurrent action players on one machine: http://fuse.rupy.se/about.html

You have to pick your battles.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by 72deluxe on Friday March 12, 2021 @02:39PM (#26439982)
10 seconds? What disk were you using?

How will you ever get those 8 seconds back??

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Friday March 12, 2021 @03:27PM (#26440479)
It's almost never a IO bottleneck, the amount of code is too small for it to be IO.

8 seconds x 1 million compiles = 92 days!

When you code action games you want to iterate quickly to make the controls and physics as good as possible.

I made a .dll/.so hot-deploy system to be able to work effectively, so I can hot-deploy the game in <1 second on the Raspberry but then on the PC I do it in 100 microseconds!

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by mattnewton on Friday March 12, 2021 @12:38PM (#26438404)
I think that kinda proves the parent comments point, since all the apps were re-written for mobile.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by posterboy on Saturday March 13, 2021 @01:04AM (#26444391)
No, not everything requires a complete rewrite. The browsers for example benefit from code reuse. The UI is another matter. Wrapping and rewriting is a given on the system side, though.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by gegtik on Friday March 12, 2021 @12:34PM (#26438345)
are you saying phones are running general purpose OS and apps?
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by u678u on Friday March 12, 2021 @12:38PM (#26438405)
yes. Browser, youtube, video calls, docs, games, there isn't much they can't do.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by tasogare on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:19PM (#26438954)
They can’t be used for local development, so hard to consider them a general computing platform. They are more akin to consoles than PC.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by entropicdrifter on Friday March 12, 2021 @02:01PM (#26439508)
Thonny runs well on my Pinebook Pro, so in that case comparably wimpy ARM based Linux machines can be used for things like Python development even with an IDE.

It just depends on how heavy-duty what you're trying to do is. Scripting in general runs fine on my ARM SBCs. The real trouble is if you've got something that you need to recompile every time you make a change and you don't have a cache set up.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by detaro on Sunday March 14, 2021 @08:24AM (#26454727)
The tooling isn't particularly nice, but on Android it is clearly possible.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by posterboy on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:34PM (#26439133)
If I wanted to programm I could get a shell on a server for example.

Now touch screen keyboards are a different problem.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Friday March 12, 2021 @03:22PM (#26440428)
When I see truth being downvoted I try to upvote, hn would be a better place if people learned to upvote, the high karma downers are really toxic.

You need a keyboard and mouse to be productive, case closed!

Edit: see the toxic high karma downers even got to this one!

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by 3np on Friday March 12, 2021 @06:01PM (#26442020)
Meta commenting on comment voting is against the HN guidelines and tends to get downvoted. Please review them again.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Sunday March 14, 2021 @08:20AM (#26454708)
Jesus christ this place is toxic by design.

I bet you the high karma people click on your profile to see how much karma you have before they push you down.

Eventually the HN database will leak, it's inevitable, I'll make sure to grab a copy then.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by 3np on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @08:10AM (#26489936)
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by posterboy on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:33PM (#26439122)
Abstractly speaking, yes. I notice the limitations on mobile of course, but you cannot deny the potential.

I'm barking up the wrong tree, am I? sorry for the misunderstanding

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by TaylorAlexander on Friday March 12, 2021 @07:06PM (#26442501)
It’s got plenty of speed to drive my autonomous GPS guided solar powered open source farm robot!

I guess I did write the code from scratch, but it’s just Python, nothing fancy.

https://community.twistedfields.com/t/introducing-acorn-a-pr...

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Saturday March 13, 2021 @04:39AM (#26445348)
You should be able to drive that with a Zero no?

Where is the battery? Lead-acid or Lithium?

What does this even do, I see no arms, cutters or anything?

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by TaylorAlexander on Saturday March 13, 2021 @04:03PM (#26449962)
It could be done with a zero with C++ I would imagine. IIRC the zero is 700mhz single core. I’m using a Pi4 which is quad core 2.XGhz. Our current Python code uses 20-50% (I forget exactly) of each core. I’ve not made any attempt to optimize, and most of that is probably object serialization for IPC which could be improved (for eg with shared memory).

No battery. It runs directly off of solar power with a supercapacitor bank to provide peak currents. Power draw while driving walking speed on level ground is 20-30 watts with the latest drive system (not shown in the video). Solar panels are 8 100 watt panels.

The project is a work in progress. We just open sourced everything and wanted to start building a community of interested followers who would like to see our progress and share ideas. I do mention this in the blog post but I realized afterwards that understandably a lot of people just watch the video and don’t get the full picture. But we’re adding a vision system now and tools will come in the future. We’re solidifying the base vehicle right now which is what you saw in the video.

Feel free to ask me here or join our community at the first link I shared if you have any more questions!

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Sunday March 14, 2021 @08:10AM (#26454661)
No the 4 is 1.5GHz, it would melt at 2+GHz!

If you code Python then you really have missunderstood what tools are available.

My recommendations: C or Java.

You need a battery if you want to be able to predict work, we had a whole month of cloudy weather last year!

I missed the video, I'll check it now.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by ClumsyPilot on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:44PM (#26439270)
Whats this obsession with ysing raspberri pi for work? It makes no sense, PI doesnt ecen have proper cooling. Get an Intel Nuc if you want a miniature PC, at least it has all the ports, disks, etc.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by lostlogin on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:57PM (#26439462)
That’s a vastly more powerful machine, 8-10x the size when counting the brick, and way less fun to hack about with. I love my Nucs but the Pi is better.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by foobar33333 on Friday March 12, 2021 @10:16PM (#26443583)
The nuc is better when you want to use a PC for real work. The pi is better for when you want to drive random sensors and displays as well has general tinkering. I'd hardly call one better than the other.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by jandrese on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:58PM (#26439477)
The NUC is literally 5x the price of a Raspberry Pi.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by sam_lowry_ on Friday March 12, 2021 @03:38PM (#26440591)
Hm... A Celeron NUC without memory and disk starts at around 130$, IIRC.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by u678u on Saturday March 13, 2021 @10:51AM (#26447342)
Which is about 5x the price of raspberry pi. I get your point though, I actually have a pentium nuc.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by ClumsyPilot on Sunday March 14, 2021 @01:43PM (#26457131)
But you also need storage / Sdcard, mouse, keyboard, monitor, etc.

Im embedded/Iot none of that matters, but if we are talking about work, using PI makes no sence when compared to even an old laptop form ebay.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Friday March 12, 2021 @03:14PM (#26440348)
For the pi you need these heatsinks: http://move.rupy.se/file/pi_4.jpg

The NUC is an ok alternative with the (for modern unavailable) Streacom NCX cases.

I'll use the Raspberry when the KWh is $1, until them I'm trying to move to Atom.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by tlavoie on Friday March 12, 2021 @05:55PM (#26441962)
Aluminum heat-sink cases work well too.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Saturday March 13, 2021 @04:37AM (#26445320)
Yes if they look like the Streacom NC1/NC2... but all the cases for the Raspberry have bad design.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by tlavoie on Sunday March 14, 2021 @12:34AM (#26453051)
OK, I'll bite. How do, "all the cases for the Raspberry have bad design"?

I have one of these Flirc cases: https://www.adafruit.com/product/4553. It looks fairly nice, acts as a heat sink, so my Pi 4 chugs along fine without having to throttle even when using all cores.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by bullen on Sunday March 14, 2021 @08:06AM (#26454641)
I'm talking subjective aestetic design.

Look here to understand: https://streacom.com/wp-content/uploads/nc1-wy-025-000-b.jpg

THAT is good design, comparatively everything released for the Raspberry looks like turds.

The Flirc in particular has 2 major flaws: It has a plastic lid on the top?! And it has the logo, things that have to put their name on their product always have bad design. The design should be the logo!

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by passthejoe on Saturday March 13, 2021 @06:59PM (#26451380)
Agree. The main issue with using rpi as a desktop is the slow disk i/o. M2 on the board is what RPi 5 needs.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by dokem on Friday March 12, 2021 @11:46AM (#26437708)
Raspi really needs to come out with a 'pro' model. I guess they kind of did with the compute module but raspi's are used a lot professionally in industry, probably more than they are used as a tool to get kids and developing nations into computer science.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by barkingcat on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:00PM (#26438690)
Raspi doesn't "need" to do this at all.

The main goal of their foundation is to support education, not to satisfy a "pro" market.

Just because people use them as tools doesn't mean they change the charter of their non-profit foundation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi_Foundation

I'd say the other way around: the "pro" people should go find another board to use, of which there are many.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by geerlingguy on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:04PM (#26438757)
Just noting that according to the Pi Foundation/Pi Trading, they do sell 44% of their boards to industrial customers[1], so education is definitely a primary goal, but they do have a much broader audience, and I'm sure that influences some of the decisions about what hardware and price points to target.

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/for-industry/

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by justin66 on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:17PM (#26438918)
That figure is amazing.

I interviewed in person at a leading industrial automation company over five years ago. They were looking for someone to work on ARM stuff and I was (naively) proud of the work I'd done with the original Raspberry Pi in school. The hiring manager had never even heard of the Pi...

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by HeyLaughingBoy on Saturday March 13, 2021 @09:05PM (#26452118)
Things have changed a lot since then. One of the well-known names in industrial automation, Opto-22, now has adapters to connect their hardware to raspberry pi. And they're not the only one.

http://developer.opto22.com/pi/

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by willis936 on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:22PM (#26438986)
They don’t need to, but the desire to see it is understandable. Raspi is the de facto ARM linux box. It’s cheap, it’s everywhere, it’s performant. If you have a niche interest then the platform that it’s been developed and tested on is raspi. That’s far more valuable than a $10 savings on a $30 computer.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by varispeed on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:10PM (#26438822)
I don't understand this divide. Why people shouldn't have access to "pro" level tools for education? I had plenty of instances in my life when I tried to do something with consumer tools only to be disappointed and giving up, but later on re-discovering the topic with better tools that lead me to some great results. Cost of low end nvme drives is getting closer to more expensive SD cards now (which are not meant to be used as a hard drive). I see no reason why RPi shouldn't release an update with nvme slot and even dropping SDCard slot altogether.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by ClumsyPilot on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:40PM (#26439217)
We used terrible and old tools at uni, so the value of the degree is questionable
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by mdtusz on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:11PM (#26438836)
The "pro" models exist - they're just not Pi's.

Industrial IoT does use Pi's a fair bit, but this is IMO a misuse (I'm guilty of it too) and in the long term can be a disservice. The Pi is a great platform for a go-to-market product, but they have many shortcomings that for most use-cases in industry are showstoppers (most notably, Pi's will often fail without warning, or their "disk" will become corrupt). More expensive industrial products are out there and typically are more robust, and designed in a way that they can be more seamlessly integrated to a product - once the upfront costs are paid (both in development and dollars).

What really needs to happen is other manufacturers making the development on their hardware more straightforwards. What the Pi foundation has done is shown that companies and developers want to just be able to run a widely available and minimal linux distribution and not have to muck about with proprietary and poorly documented SDK's behind closed doors.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by deckard1 on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:49PM (#26439334)
> Pi's will often fail without warning, or their "disk" will become corrupt

You get what you pay for. But this is beating a tired horse that I'm skeptical was ever true to begin with. Are the people with SD card corruption just using crap cards to begin with? I've used a pi4 and rock64 and neither had any disk corruption. Plus you can boot on USB today. And fail without warning? Is that really a thing? No sensor saying there is a heat problem?

You can definitely reach for an industrial product with similar specs. But just keep in mind that niche products may have even less market testing than a Pi. There is some truly crap hardware and software out there that people suffer with simply because it's the only player in the niche.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by alyandon on Saturday March 13, 2021 @11:33AM (#26447641)
Indeed - you do get what you pay for. I've personally had one 2nd gen rpi fail without warning and have also had several instances of SD card corruption.

The SD card is probably crap like you say but it can be formatted and passed read/write verification testing when connected to a PC which is a bit weird.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by sam_lowry_ on Friday March 12, 2021 @03:41PM (#26440631)
rock64 has eMMC ;-)
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by dokem on Friday March 12, 2021 @04:28PM (#26441192)
PIs are used in industry when possible because so easy because unofficial documentation and community is so large to the point where practically every use case has already been documented.

It's much easier for Raspi foundation to release a more industrialized version than it is for another manufacturer to create this support and community. They could still operate on their non-profit mission with the profit.

Industrial microcontroller and embedded companies do need to also make their software and docs better. There seems to be some modernization but it's slow.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by joezydeco on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:24PM (#26439011)
The "pro" models exist - they're just not Pi's.

Ssssh. That's blasphemy here.

Any other ARM platform mentioned here gets downvoted and shouted down with "But it's not $40!". Let them play with their toys and leave them alone.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by dendrite9 on Friday March 12, 2021 @04:46PM (#26441369)
I'm curious about this as someone who keeps eyeing the Pi's for a solution to a few problems customers have brought up. It looks like there is a pretty big cost jump to get something equivalent, but I may just not know where to look.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by joezydeco on Friday March 12, 2021 @05:08PM (#26441574)
There are places outside HN where ARM-based product developers are happy to talk about this stuff and share their knowledge.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by nimbius on Friday March 12, 2021 @12:22PM (#26438193)
it would still depend on the firmware. people forget that Raspberry Pi is controlled entirely by the proprietary ThreadX RTOS which acts as a hypervisor and allows Linux to run as a virtual "guest" on the pi.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreadX

and for the uninitiated, ThreadX RTOS is not the same as Intel's ME. ThreadX is a critical dependency to run any OS on PI. without Intel ME, you can still run an OS.

this virtualization model is still largely why Pi performance is complete garbage compared to pine64, banana pi, beagle, and others.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by justin66 on Friday March 12, 2021 @12:41PM (#26438447)
ThreadX does not do what you think it does. On the Pi it acts as the first stage bootloader, it is not used as a hypervisor.

What you've written above is not even remotely true. You've been corrected on this before, you ought to stop spreading kooky misinformation.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by tyingq on Friday March 12, 2021 @12:28PM (#26438261)
I thought ThreadX only ran on the VideoCore, basically to bootstrap Linux on the ARM processer. The only performance that might affect is elapsed time to boot.

That doesn't sound like virtualization to me. Do have more info?

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by monocasa on Friday March 12, 2021 @12:26PM (#26438245)
I think you're mistaken about several pieces.

First off ThreadX on the video core does not run as a hypervisor.

It also does not impede perf on the ARM core.

Additionally, yes, Intel ME is required to run anything on Intel cores. Without it the main cores don't start.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by nimbius on Friday March 12, 2021 @12:42PM (#26438465)
ME isnt required at all...

https://www.csoonline.com/article/3220476/researchers-say-no...

To explain this again, it technically is a guest. The GPU cores run a real time operating system called ThreadX. This operating system is closed source and rules the system without the open source Linux Kernel being aware of it.

When the Raspberry Pi starts booting the CPU is completely disconnected (technically in reset state) and the GPU is the one that starts the system. You can have a look at the `/boot` folder and you will see some of the binary blobs used by the GPU to both start the CPU and run its own ThreadX OS (bootcode.bin and start.elf). You can learn more details about the boot process here.

After the GPU has the CPU load the Linux Kernel, it doesn’t just stay there waiting to act as a graphics-processing-unit. The GPU is still in charge.

IME is a different beast entirely.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by tyingq on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:00PM (#26438688)
"ME isn't required at all..."

The document you linked refers to a more technical one that explains they don't disable the ME until after the main OS is booted, because...

"The disappointing fact is that on modern computers, it is impossible to completely disable ME. This is primarily due to the fact that this technology is responsible for initialization, power management, and launch of the main processor."

http://blog.ptsecurity.com/2017/08/disabling-intel-me.html

So, it is serving the same role as the Rpi VideoCore.

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by monocasa on Friday March 12, 2021 @12:48PM (#26438547)
ME is still required; that strap option that the article describes just disables the stuff like it's network stack and remote admin facilities after it has started the Intel cores. It is still required to be on for power management for instance.

Also, interestingly you can swap out the terms on your paragraph and it's still true

> When an Intel CPU starts booting the CPU is completely disconnected (technically in reset state) and the ME is the one that starts the system. You can have a look at the boot flash partitions and you will see some of the binary blobs used by the ME to both start the CPU and run its own ThreadX OS.

Although albeit, on newer MEs they switched from ThreadX to Minix. The ME is very very very similar.

"Technically" it's not a guest relationship, the ARM cores start in EL3 (above hypervisor mode in secure mode).

And none of this show any perf costs to having a management core (except maybe some minimal bandwidth pressure?)

Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by danaliv on Friday March 12, 2021 @02:44PM (#26440043)
> ThreadX ... rules the system

> The GPU is still in charge

Can you explain in specific, concrete terms what this means?

For example: I've read that the undervoltage monitoring happens on the ThreadX process, and that it throttles the ARM cores when low voltage is detected. The vcgencmd has more info on this, including the following bit field returned by vcgencmd get_throttled:

    Bit Hex value   Meaning
    0          1    Under-voltage detected
    1          2    Arm frequency capped
    2          4    Currently throttled
    3          8    Soft temperature limit active
    16     10000    Under-voltage has occurred
    17     20000    Arm frequency capping has occurred
    18     40000    Throttling has occurred
    19     80000    Soft temperature limit has occurred
What else does it do?
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by ylyn on Friday March 12, 2021 @12:47PM (#26438530)
It's not running as a hypervisor. A hypervisor is specifically something that hosts VMs. The OS running on the ARM core is not running in a VM.
Re:M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board by beatrobot on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:02PM (#26438720)
Seem similar to the CSME on Intel platforms

https://igor-blue.github.io/2021/02/04/secure-boot.html#earl...