End of an era


WizardStan

Mega GP Mania
Joined
May 24, 2008
Messages
16,731
After nearly 9 years of non-stop service, off only during the days between house moving, my BeagleBoard revC has blinked its last blink.
I bought it as a hold-over while the Pandora's status was in flux and it's been a happy dedicated server ever since: internet file storage, IRC, remote access point; compiled many things on it for the Pandora when the cross-compiler chain I had in place was being finicky too.
But a few days ago, sometime overnight, it became unresponsive to my pings, and even a direct serial connection only got garbage, though the heartbeat continued to blink indicating the kernel was still active. I made the fatal mistake of resetting it, and it never came back up. Tragedy. After a few days I can't even get the boot loader to respond, I think it's safe to say it's gone for good.
It is actually kind of serendipitous though; I got the BeagleBoard while waiting for the Pandora, now I can get something else while waiting for the Pyra. It's what little it would have wanted. If it were alive and not just a personification of nerdiness, that is.
Any suggestions for a suitable SBC replacement? There's so many now and I have done nearly no research. :p
 
Dare I say another BeagleBoard?
Are there any sort of requirements with things like processor (architecture/speed/cores), memory, I/O ports (usb/gpio/sata/ethernet), etc.?

As you said, there's quite a few out there, so I guess it depends on what you need

Edit: And price range?
 
The IGEPv5 with mSATA is great, but it's not a real 1GbE as it goes through a USB hub, I saw weird stuff happening when using as a proxy.
Odroid xu4 has temperature issues, and making a rootfs is a pain, bootloader must be signed.
The jetson tk1 has real ethernet, and also have a very fast sd card port. USB hub needed. No plug'n play RTC.
The three above have mainstream kernel support.

MIPS CI20 looks good (I rarely use it) but has poor support.
 
Well it may be too trendy, but if you don't need SATA, the Pi3 has good support community, it's cheap and the Wifi and bluetooth are a bonus too. But it may be a little too easy for those that want a challenge.
 
After nearly 9 years of non-stop service, off only during the days between house moving, my BeagleBoard revC has blinked its last blink.
I bought it as a hold-over while the Pandora's status was in flux and it's been a happy dedicated server ever since: internet file storage, IRC, remote access point; compiled many things on it for the Pandora when the cross-compiler chain I had in place was being finicky too.
But a few days ago, sometime overnight, it became unresponsive to my pings, and even a direct serial connection only got garbage, though the heartbeat continued to blink indicating the kernel was still active. I made the fatal mistake of resetting it, and it never came back up. Tragedy. After a few days I can't even get the boot loader to respond, I think it's safe to say it's gone for good.
It is actually kind of serendipitous though; I got the BeagleBoard while waiting for the Pandora, now I can get something else while waiting for the Pyra. It's what little it would have wanted. If it were alive and not just a personification of nerdiness, that is.
Any suggestions for a suitable SBC replacement? There's so many now and I have done nearly no research. :p

I have 2 of these nearly unused here.
Are you from Germany?
Then i can send one of mine BeagleBoard Rev C3 as Christmas Gift.
No need for research a new Thing and you can use all your SD Cards and Compiled Things again :)
 
Then i can send one of mine BeagleBoard Rev C3 as Christmas Gift
I appreciate the offer but it was time for an upgrade anyway; I've spent way too much time fighting to keep it up to date.
That's probably what I'm looking for, something quad core or better, a GB of RAM at least, something that can do a little more than just serve up a few files. Something that can actually use a more recent kernel!

I have issues with the toolchain for building for the Pi, issues I have literally discovered today. I want to be able to cross-compile with a standard toolchain and have it just work.

Maybe something with an Allwinner A80 in it? Thoughts?
 
Judging by the linux support on that wiki page Magic Sam found, getting good support of a recent kernel might be the first feature to look for, then see what CPUs you can get from those.
 
Huh. There's also the Banana Pi M3 with an A83T, and it's cheap. Needs a fan though, apparently; gets very hot.
So I always assumed that Cortex-A8 was better than Cortex-A7, because 8 > 7 (and A53 > A15 > A8), but looking at the wiki pages I'm not so sure anymore.
[doublepost=1481804574,1481802922][/doublepost]Ah yes, I forgot I can also search for reviews. Seems the the Banana Pi series comes up poorly.
 
From Exophase :
"
Real performance is going to vary quite a lot from program to program. My very, very, very rough observations are, at the same clock speeds:

Cortex-A7 is about the same as Cortex-A8, but significantly weaker for NEON heavy code
Cortex-A9 is 25% better than Cortex-A8, a little weaker for NEON heavy code
Cortex-A53 is a little weaker than Cortex-A9
Cortex-A15 is about 50% better than Cortex-A9
Cortex-A57 is maybe 20% faster than Cortex-A15
Cortex-A72 is maybe 15% faster than Cortex-A57
Krait 300 is somewhere from around Cortex-A9 to halfway to Cortex-A15 depending on the application
Mongoose is around Cortex-A72, a little better sometimes
Kyro is a little lower than Cortex-A72, except in NEON floating point where it's better

The latter couple are mostly just based on Geekbench so take with particular salt. Oh and anything currently in Apple's SoCs wipes the floor with these cores in single threaded performance (and especially perf/MHz) but that's not really here nor there.

Also, going from 32-bit to 64-bit might make a significant improvement, or might result in something a bit slower... For a lot of emulators with recompilers it could make a big difference because of the extra registers and flags-less cmp+branch instructions, and well if you're emulating something 64-bit..."
 
Arch Linux claim the original Banana Pi and Pro will take the mainline latest kernel, though I don't know what video performance is like for example. Still, it might be the basis of something nice.
 
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