State of Embedded: Q4 2025 Overview

[wolrah]

Something I'd be very interested in seeing summarized is the current state of fully open source software on SoCs and SBCs. I hate how common the situation described in the nVidia section where SoCs that require vendor kernels get abandoned on ancient software, so it would be very useful to know what SoCs are supported to a useful level by mainline kernels.

I feel like there are three tiers of support that most people would be interested in:

1. Usable for headless appliances (serial console or unaccelerated graphics, wired networking, storage, USB)

2. Usable for interactive use (accelerated graphics, WiFi/BT)

3. Fully supported (all major hardware works)

[robotnikman]

I'm guessing this is why, as others have already mentioned, there seems to be an increase in use of x86 processors like the N100. You don't need to worry about stuff like specific vendor kernels.

[megous]

It's always possible to just go to dts directory in latest Linux kernel, and just look for what's enabled on SoC or board level, for a quick apprisal of level of mainline support.

You will not catch all the details this way, drivers may be incomplete, or things may not be fully integrated to work together really well, but then that's usually fixable, especially if datasheets are available.

[zokier]

Are there any recent ARM SoCs that are fully supported by mainline kernel and don't have weird proprietary blobby boot chain?

[NewJazz]

I agree having this info more plainly available would be great, but in the interim interested folks can take a look at postmarketos device support, collabora blogs, and the pine64 wiki to get some of this info.

[rcarmo]

Huh. It mentions neither Intel nor AMD, and I am seeing _a lot_ of N100/N150 industrial SBCs right now (outside the hobbyist space). Intel in particular seems to be replaying their approach of flooding the market with Atom chips and making N-series available to OEMs in volume and relatively low price.

Full marks for Rockchip coverage, yes, they're filling in the gaps below the RK3588, although some of those chips aren't that interesting in terms of power budget and have apparently low yields.

[wpm]

The N100/150's are great.

[Sponge5]

it's right there in the first section:

   highlighting notable advancements in ARM-based Systems-on-Chip (SoCs) and their increasing competitiveness against traditional x86 platforms.

[tonymet]

the AMD and intel mini PCs are a fabulous value and the best solution for hobbyist / homelab

[jpm_sd]

Nothing about NXP? They are a pretty big player in this space, and mostly do a great job contributing upstream to the kernel, but I guess they don't have a hobby-level entry point readily available.

I've used NXP-based embedded Linux hardware from Toradex, Gateworks and EmbeddedTS in previous projects, lots of vendors out there.

https://www.toradex.com/

https://www.gateworks.com/

https://www.embeddedts.com/

https://variscite.com/

https://www.ibase.com.tw/en

https://www.phytec.com/

https://www.ezurio.com/

[jauntywundrkind]

Lovely snapshot in time view of the small computers that drive a ton of product innovation.

One major gap I'd really like to see covered better is power consumption. We've started seeing unboxing and reviews for the Arduino Uno Q for example, but no one seems to be breaking out a simple USB power meter to get some idea how much power it takes, headless or sitting at desktop.

Pretty nice that so many chips have pretty good Linux support.

[jandrese]

I have some (somewhat older) OrangePis here that came with a board covering heatsink with an integrated fan because it turns out they really need it. The things get hot to the touch when working hard. I don't have any power measurement hooked up to them, but they have to be drawing a fair bit of juice to warm up that much.

[HeyMeco]

In this format I go deep down the Mailing lists, news articles and more to summarise what exciting hardware has been published and software has been merged into Linux. Also breaking down rumours and developer conferences about future SoC‘s. Hope you all find it useful!

[joezydeco]

If you could mirror your feed on Bluesky, that would be appreciated. Some of us will not use X.

[mberger]

Can you include more prices? It would give me an idea of the cost even if it is in USD. What i found most annoying about my latest search is that it is hard to find something not named raspberry or Arduino for a reasonable price. I was looking for a simple gigabit board with usb 3 to attach a removable drive to. The only one i found was raspberry pi orange 3B . Nobody else seemed to have gigabit nic with usb 3.

[synergy20]

This could be improved a lot IMHO.

NXP's IMX6/8 family is dominant in the market, really should have presence there.

And TI's ARM series, still popular in beagleboard family and used widely in the field.

And Intel's N100/N150, though I'm unsure if they're still "SBC" boards.

Allwinner, ESP32 are also major players from China.

Now apparently Qualcomm is entering the fight with new chips on Arduino UNO Q.

NXP and TI are both open source friendly, unlike broadcom. My first choice will be NXP.

Never heard about CIX.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Thanks for covering the software support side of things; that's always been the worst part of the ecosystem, and annoyingly hard to get info on.

On which note: Oh, wow, the Radxa Dragon Q6A looks great! Mainline support, good hardware, good price. Once it's back in stock I may have to buy one:)

[topspin]

> Radxa Dragon Q6A looks great

Indeed. With 16GB RAM, NVME, integrated GPU, 1Gbps ethernet and Wi-Fi, it's basically the mean 2017-2018 laptop. External Wi-Fi antenna connectors (plural) is eye opening. Too bad it's Quectel AIC8800.

[bangaladore]

Title critique:

RaspberryPi is not an SoC vendor. They take proprietary SOCs from Broadcom, use proprietary firmware and build a product around it. They obviously upstream what they can, but they fundamentally are a system integrator, not an SoC vendor.

[klelatti]

Not to disagree with your critique but just to note that they are a microcontroller vendor with the RP2040 and RP2350.

I do wonder if there is a long term wish to break their dependency on Broadcom but I suspect creating an SoC for the main Pi series is probably in the 'too difficult' category.

[wolrah]

Pis use Broadcom SoCs, not Qualcomm.

[bertm]

This misses the NVIDIA Jetson/Orin/Thor line of GPU-enabled edge computers which are more comparable with Raspberry Pis. The Jetson Orin Nano Super is $250. Another feature which we find useful is the native NVMe drive support. For the price, this blows RPis out of the water for imaging applications.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/autonomous-machines/embedded-sy...

[pjmlp]

This looks very thin and Linux focused to be the "state of embedded".

I would expect such title to encompass more hardware architectures and the plethora of embedded OSes available in the industry.

[RealityVoid]

You're right, but it seems to me that Linux has slowly been eating this field. I personally didn't work a lot on Linux platforms, but they seem to be everywhere.

[HeyMeco]

First of all thank you everybody for reading and commenting! I want to address some of the comments I got regarding the article:

- xyz vendor is not covered: For this there is a simple answer, I don't have the hardware so I can't make a fair judgement when reporting about it. I don't want to be another reporter of basic benchmark scores & 1080P Youtube playback but actually show off the hardware capabilties with the right software. Hopefully this will be possible with more in the future as this project grows

- This is only one sector of the space why don't you have micro controllers or x86: While I want to cover all aspects of the space I am not an embedded engineer. I started during covid with the goal to replace my X86 homelab server with an ARM one to save power and got deeper into the rabbit hole until I ended up maintaining some boards and doing some Debian/Ubuntu based bring ups in my freetime. This led to me wanting to have one place to share my findings along the way and document things that might leave one stranded in the world of Yocto/U-Boot/Linux Kernel/Device-Trees/etc. and I created sbcwiki.com, not only for me to share my findings but for others to contribute with simple markdown files to the GitHub repo too.

[adboc]

The biggest problem for me with Raspberry Pi alternatives is the Linux support. Given the fact that getting mainline support is hard & long, I like the approach RPi has taken, to fork the kernel, add support for most parts of the SoC, upstream it and rebase the fork regularly. And I can still use my RPi model B with the latest OS they release. For example, I bought RK3588-based board and the officially supported kernel version is 6.1. I know that Collabora and other people are working hard to have upstream support [1], but it will take time until all IPs are covered. Is there any alternative that has Linux support comparable to Raspberry Pi?

[1] https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-35...

[bmurphy1976]

Since they're all RPI alternatives anyway and you don't get the ecosystem benefits, you should try an Intel N100. I switched my personal services over to one of those a couple years ago, and it's a great bang-for-your-buck small server. Being an Intel chip, stock Ubuntu just works. I've had no compatibility issues.

[8cvor6j844qw_d6]

I have dabbled in model edge processing like Efficientnet and YOLO on Hailo platform.

Raspberry Pi and its AI HAT+ seems to be the most accessible, often others can easily pick it up the basics and get up and running without much trouble even without experience.

I wonder if there is any alternative? Raspberry Pi 5 + the 26 TOPS HAT+ is not cheap.

[babl-yc]

What Raspberry Pi is to Broadcom (developer-friendly SBCs), Beagleboard is to TI.

It's a slightly different approach -- Beagleboard is a non-profit and emphasizes openly purchasable components. But similar in that it is the cheapest way to tinker with SoCs from that vendor.

BeagleY-AI has 4 TOPS for ~$70. AI inference tooling is still improving but I've been working on it here: https://docs.beagleboard.org/boards/beagley/ai/demos/using-e...

[justin66]

> I wonder if there is any alternative? Raspberry Pi 5 + the 26 TOPS HAT+ is not cheap.

Combined they're like $250? Not expensive.

On the other hand, at that price maybe you ought to get a Jetson Orin Nano.

[tonetegeatinst]

Does any SBC offer SFP+ or SFP28?

I don't see any option to sort by network speed or network chip

[nbf_1995]

The solidrun LX2 offers 4x SFP+, but that board is getting quite old at this point.

There are a couple of bananapi router boards that have 1 maybe 2 SFP+

[Havoc]

The ones that do have pcie are generally one lane of gen 3. some n100 boards might have enough of you stick storage on data

[taffronaut]

I'm not sure that the RK3688 and a big chunk of the article spent on its specs belongs in a "State of Embedded: Q4 2025 Overview" given that it's due sometime in 2026. I'm sure it's going to be great but I suggest it belongs to a future state.

On the other hand, CIX have been putting actual Arm v9 hardware in developers' hands for some time.

[asadm]

I am working with Rockchip rv1106 which has 1 TOPS NPU but also some cool DSP features which has helped me do very interesting things.

For my project I am making a SLAM/VIO using it, see video: https://x.com/_asadmemon/status/1977737626951041225

[klawed]

Surprisingly no mention of ESP soc’s. Mane esp boards easily replace both arduino and raspberry pi zero projects with a single board.

[bityard]

Which ESP chips run Linux?

[sheepybloke]

A lot of the chips have started including NPUs. How are applications supposed to access that acceleration now with embedded Linux? Does linux handle this for you, or do you need to leverage some specific drivers like CUDA?

[HeyMeco]

Ideally things are going to adapt the Mesa Teflon framework. See here: https://docs.mesa3d.org/teflon.html

Available for NXP IMX8M, Amlogic A311D and RK3588

[dmitrygr]

vendor-specific drivers are the norm. Usually on an obsolete kernel version which never gets updated.

[nickpeterson]

Anything new happening on the risc-v side of things? Last I heard there were some micro-itx boards at around rpi4 speed but haven’t heard much since.

[lazycatjumping]

RISC-V eats the low-end microcontrollers range alive at the moment with a lot of interesting features (integrated PHYs, etc.) coming from the vendors.

[Havoc]

The dragon one sounds interesting. mainline support, cheap price point and npu/gpu would be great