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Re:Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberr... by hinkley on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @05:59PM (#34976139)
If we could get an off the shelf SOC that's powerful enough to manage a PCIe daughter card, that would make me so happy.

Software defined radio, offloaded eBNF, RAID controllers, are just the most obvious compute peripherals but there are a million others that could exist but don't.

Re:Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberr... by Schattenbaer on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @06:06PM (#34976205)
We maybe come from different worlds but I have soc == security operations centre and ebnf == extended Backus-Naur form.

What are these in the context of your comment, though?

Re:Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberr... by atlgator on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @06:40PM (#34976543)
You're right. SOC versus SoC. The capitalization is important.
Re:Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberr... by EwanToo on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @06:18PM (#34976341)
SoC in this case is a system on a chip - despite the "a" it's abbreviated the same

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_on_a_chip

Re:Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberr... by _joel on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @06:37PM (#34976518)
Probably see SBC's used more as a term for them than SoC's as they incorporate more than just the die (imho)
Re:Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberr... by monocasa on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @07:24PM (#34977011)
Well, except once you have a PCIe daughter card it's no longer an SBC; you have at least two boards right there.
Re:Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberr... by _joel on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @08:09PM (#34977421)
No but it is before you add one, so that's the best place to start.
Re:Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberr... by monocasa on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @08:25PM (#34977544)
Not necessarily. If this is based on a CM4 (almost certainly), then there's no SBC at all since the CM4 is a SoM.
Re:Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberr... by _joel on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @09:16PM (#34977914)
Yes and there are dozens more than just the CM4 that have it embedded... on a single system board.
Re:Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberr... by monocasa on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @09:40PM (#34978097)
The point is that the terms aren't fungible. And in fact the term SBC probably doesn't apply either to the original article, nor what hinkley is describing.
Re:Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberr... by jbverschoor on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @06:27PM (#34976431)
CaPiTaLiZaTiOn
Re:Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberr... by waste_monk on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @06:46PM (#34976612)
Not them but I would assumes SoC is System on (a) Chip, and ebnf may be a typo of eBPF (in the context of eBPF offloading to perform filtering on the NIC [1])

[1] https://www.netronome.com/media/documents/eBPF_HW_OFFLOAD_HN...

Re:Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberr... by _joel on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @06:07PM (#34976210)
Aren't there quite a few already? People have been powering eGPU's with them.
Re:Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberr... by miniman1337 on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @06:03PM (#34976174)
CM4 supports it, although its just 1x and PCIe 2.0
Re:Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberr... by monocasa on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @06:23PM (#34976395)
The RPi4 SoC has a lot constraints wrt PCIe and frankly appears to not implement the PCIe spec completely or correctly. A lot PCIe devices simply don't work with it.
Re:Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberr... by meindnoch on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @06:43PM (#34976571)
Offloaded eBNF? You must be dealing with extremely large grammars if you need dedicated hardware to manage it :0
Re:Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberr... by monocasa on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @07:23PM (#34976998)
I think they're mean a NIC that you can offload eBPF programs onto.
Re:Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberr... by hinkley on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @07:42PM (#34977185)
Exactly.
Re:Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberr... by Matsta on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @06:56PM (#34976684)
Rock 5B [1] or any other board running on a RK33588

[1] https://wiki.radxa.com/Rock5/hardware/5b

You have 4x lanes of Pcie 3.0 and the Rock 5b has 2.5gb Ethernet too.

Software support isn't there yet but it's slowly getting better.

Re:Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberr... by hinkley on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @07:49PM (#34977230)
I would expect the internal bandwidth of a daughter card to need to be upward of 2x the PCIe lanes that it supports to the motherboard.

For instance a RAID card has to accept data from the motherboard and write it to the disks as fast as the disks allow.

We could do a PCIe card, but what I'm hoping for is to be able to dig ourselves out of the binary blob problem with have where Linux barely controls the actual hardware these days, and security concerns aren't something you can volunteer to fix. Our peripherals are pretending not to be computers but really they are and have been for some time.

If vendors aren't going to give us Open hardware, which it seems is never going to happen, then 'general purpose' expansion cards might be a forcing function.

Re:Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberr... by wmf on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @08:14PM (#34977461)
After reading this thread a few times I realized you're asking for an SoC that is a daughter card, aka a DPU.