News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Radxa Dragon Q8B: A Laptop Cosplaying as an SBC? by preisschild on Monday June 01, 2026 @12:29PM (#48359077)
I wonder how well a usb 10gbit ethernet adapter would work then

But I really apprecate your reply!

I'll definitely buy one for testing when they become available for reasonable prices <500EUR for 16gig memory

Re:Radxa Dragon Q8B: A Laptop Cosplaying as an SBC? by adrian_b on Monday June 01, 2026 @02:09PM (#48360510)
10 Gb/s Ethernet interfaces work fine on 10 Gb/s USB.

Both interfaces have almost the same raw bit rate (in both cases "10 Gb/s" is only an approximation, but the differences between the true bit rates and 10 Gb/s are negligible, unlike for "5 Gb/s" USB, where the data bit rate is only 4 Gb/s).

The USB protocol has a slightly higher overhead than the Ethernet protocol, so the throughput of an Ethernet 10 Gb/s interface attached on 10 Gb/s USB will be a little lower than that of a PCIe NIC, but the difference is negligible, of only a few percent.

Re:Radxa Dragon Q8B: A Laptop Cosplaying as an SBC? by preisschild on Monday June 01, 2026 @03:32PM (#48361535)
RTL8159 10GbE usb adapters seem to require USB3.2 Gen2 x2 and this seems to only have gen2
Re:Radxa Dragon Q8B: A Laptop Cosplaying as an SBC? by volemo on Monday June 01, 2026 @01:17PM (#48359774)
Hmm, is it possible to skip the Ethernet adapters in a configuration of USBC-Eth-Eth-USBC and connect USBCs directly one to another?
Re:Radxa Dragon Q8B: A Laptop Cosplaying as an SBC? by adrian_b on Monday June 01, 2026 @01:58PM (#48360356)
Unfortunately, USB does not work like Firewire, where this was possible.

USB 4, i.e. Thunderbolt, allows the emulation of network interfaces if you interconnect the USB Type C ports with a cable, but here you have USB 3, so this does not work.

On USB 3 you could interconnect 2 ports only if one of them implemented the On-the-Go specification, so it could work as either a peripheral port or a host port. Here this also does not work. On a system where this had been allowed by the hardware, it is likely that you would have needed to write yourself a device driver that emulates a network interface, because I am not aware of an already existing one, unlike for USB 4.

Re:Radxa Dragon Q8B: A Laptop Cosplaying as an SBC? by zokier on Monday June 01, 2026 @02:17PM (#48360613)
> USB 4, i.e. Thunderbolt

USB4 and TB are different things (confusingly enough)

Re:Radxa Dragon Q8B: A Laptop Cosplaying as an SBC? by adrian_b on Monday June 01, 2026 @02:54PM (#48361059)
USB 4 includes more than Thunderbolt, because Thunderbolt was not compatible with USB, despite using the same connector.

All features of Thunderbolt 3 have been inherited by USB 4, like also all those of USB 3, including the ability of Thunderbolt to emulate Ethernet interfaces when you interconnect 2 computers with a cable through their USB 4 ports, like it was already possible with Thunderbolt ports.

Re:Radxa Dragon Q8B: A Laptop Cosplaying as an SBC? by volemo on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @04:27AM (#48367477)
How could I forget about the staggering complexity of USB versions! Of course the answer is “maybe”.