[magios]

$150-$180 seems expensive for 4gb ram and 16gb flash when you can get an sbc with the same soc, the sipeed licheepi 4a with 16gb of ram and 128gb flash for $180, or $120 for 8gb ram and 8gb flash, or $135 for 8gb ram and 32gb flash

[riskable]

As someone who's bought many RPi-like boards and clones let me tell you: Minor differences in price/performance are unimportant. There's another factor that's so much more important it makes boards like the Beaglebone and RPi seem like ultra high performance bargains in comparison: Software/kernel support.

Every goddamned RPi-like SBC seems to require a very, very specific version of the Linux kernel that has been patched to hell and back. Almost always bundled with binary blobs/firmware that only work with that very specific version of the kernel.

None of these patches get upstreamed and the binary blobs/ultra proprietary who-knows-wtf-its-doing required firmware never get updated after the release. This means that you'll be stuck with whatever version of the kernel that shipped with the device forever. Complete with all the bugs and vulnerabilities that get discovered later.

Never again! Either the vendor needs a history of staying on top of things or they need to make some serious promises about upstreaming kernel patches and drivers.

Example of a terrible SBC vendor you should never buy from: Orange. All the OrangePi SBCs are exactly as I described. You can expect any bug or security issue that exists at release to be a problem with that board forever. They will never get fixed. They might release an update or two within a few months of release (if it's real bad) but that's all you'll ever get.

[eek2121]

The VisionFive 2 developers are working on getting things upstreamed/open-sourced for their board. IIRC the kernel has already mainlined many (if not all) of the patches.

Some of the real issues are as follows:

1) Most companies use Debian as a base. Debian has a notoriously slow release cycle. This means it takes loads of time to submit patches -> get approval -> get merged in a merge window -> wait for debian to use new kernel with new code.

2) The GPU situation is a mess. No decent (compatible) vendors with open source GPU drivers exist. Imagination is said to be working on open source drivers, but with no real release date, we are stuck using closed source blobs. Once drivers and Mesa get updated, we then have to wait for a new release of Debian to pick these up.

3) Far fewer people use these boards over a Raspberry Pi. This means community support takes longer to develop. The VF2 has other distros like Arch and Ubuntu, for example, but no real active community behind them. Last I checked, hardware GPU acceleration was not working in these distros.

[joezydeco]

As someone that has actually shipped RPi-like boards and clones, I'll tell you that it's just part of the job description.

They ALL suck, some just suck less than others. Broadcom, Renesas? The worst. ST, NXP, TI? Slightly better than fully sucking. Look to the chipmaker (ST, NXP) and not the board maker (Orange) for a guide in how well things go.

[jona-f]

Wait, I used OrangePi's with Allwinner chips before precisely cause of their cheap price and mainline linux support. At the time (~5 years ago) Rpi was worse, foss-wise. Here is a wiki documenting the efforts: https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort What am i missing?

[Kadin]

I agree with everything except I don't think I would have called out OrangePi as the worst of the lot -- at least not anymore.

They seem to have basically outsourced their software maintenance to Armbian, and if that relationship holds it's probably a win-win. Armbian's build system is really nice, IMO.

FriendlyElec are borderline; they make nice hardware but definitely seem to take a "here's a kernel we got to boot once, good luck!" attitude towards software support. Some of their boards are supported by Armbian but often without key features due to lack of documentation or binary blobs.

Below that is a vast sea of largely-anonymous Chinese-based hardware companies who drop a design (sometimes really neat) into the world, then disappear without a trace. Mostly I think these are designs whipped up quickly to use up spare parts, or originally designed for embedded use in a particular product and being sold on the side. (I've definitely seen 'development boards' that were clearly designed for security cameras or TV decoder boxes, f.ex.) But you are buying yourself a new hobby if you decide to get one.

[magios]

i agree, that is a problem, mainline linux and working drm, that is direct rendering manager, drivers should exist before release of the product.

[bagels]

Beaglebone Black is used in industrial applications. At scale, those price differences add up.

[bitwize]

I keep saying, the first cheap Chinese manufacturer that ships a SystemReady board is going to slaughter the competition.

[imtringued]

> There's another factor that's so much more important [...]: Software/kernel support.

Vision Five 2 it is then

[progbits]

How's the software support for sipeed stuff?

Every time I opted for cheaper clone of beagleboard or RPi I ended up regretting it when I inevitably had to spend hours building custom kernel patches and struggling to get it working reliabily. The more expensive boards usually work out of the box with mainline kernel.

For some that can be worth the extra $50.

[magios]

well, if the soc is the same, thus same cpu, gpu, and npu, kernel and userspace support should be also roughly equal, tho the device tree will differ between the two devices. i do agree that many of these sbc computers have poor initial support and many end up remaining that way. perhaps we should be requiring that mainline linux support, and working drm drivers, for gpu, exist before the product is released.

[dekhn]

do those SBCs have digital IO (GPIOs) and a realtime operating system?

The reason I'd buy a Beagle (well, really an ESP32) isn't the price, it's the convenience of havng real time GPIOs.

[brucehoult]

Sure there are GPIOs -- didn't you see the "cape" connector?

The SoC had quad C910 OoO cores (similar to A72) as the application processors. There is also a simple E902 (in-order, 2 pipe stages, RV32EMC ... basically Cortex M0 equiv) in the Always-On subsystem and a C906 (64 bit in-order, 5 pipe stages, used as main applications processor in numerous AllWinner D1, Bouffalo BL808 etc boards) in the "audio" subsystem.

[johnwalkr]

I don't think this one does, but the other models such as beaglebone black have 2, 200Mhz microprocessor cores that can access GPIO and shared memory in realtime (without an RTOS). It's a killer feature, you can have the best of both worlds. For example, a python program running in userspace, interacting with a microcontroller doing GPIO stuff quickly and in realtime.

[rcarmo]

I came here to say exactly that. Right now ARM SBCs (especially the RK3588 ones) are pretty competitive -- but, ironically, so are Intel 5xxx and N100 mini-PCs.