Raspberry Pi 3B+ Launches With Faster CPU, Dual-Band 802.11ac, Faster Ethernet

[starshipeleven]

starshipeleven There is a Mali driver for mainline and Bootlin is working on a video codec driver for mainline as well.

There are at least 2 in-development drivers, you mean one is decent already?

[starshipeleven]

No, actually out-of-the box compatibility. You can look at the list of compatible SBC at the Linux distribution's web site. For example, for the SBC I used, I downloaded the Fedora image installer and it wrote the image to the microSD. I popped that into the SBC and Fedora booted up. All further activities are just normal per the distribution (including kernels and other maintenance).

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Archi...7/Installation
You have a Raspi 3, a Pine64, a Hikey or a Dragonboard?

Because that seems to be the "list" of supported SBCs for Fedora, and the image installer does a different thing depending on what is the SBC selected.

Also, Pine64 and Hikey have a Mali GPU, so they can either package the blob or you won't use the 3D acceleration.

[starshipeleven]

Could you please give me links or at least device names so I can investigate these myself?

Marvell Armada line is the newest from Marvell, but it's headless (no GPU usually), and not terribly common in consumer devices, afaik only NAS and router systems have them (and they have no GPU).

NXP has the iMX6 which has vivante GPU and QorIQ or other expensive stuff that lacks a GPU as it's for high-end networking. The refresh of the iMX6 lineup is the iMX8 which is what most opensource fans are waiting for.

Your best bet currently is iMX6-based stuff as they have Vivante GPU that has etnaviv open driver, (actually daughterboards for iMX6 SoMs) so Hummingboards and Wandboards and Gateworks Ventana afaik (probably more, wandboards now have their raspi clone with a iMX6 SoM, and headless ones with iMX7 that has an ARM M4 microcontroller instead). Their Gigabit eth is actually half-gigabit because of hardware limitations, which is still better than a Raspi anyway.

If you want to spend little money and can live without 3D acceleration (as 3D driver for Mali is a blob) and without media acceleration for a while, then you can look at Sunxi wiki's buying guide https://linux-sunxi.org/Buying_guide

There is also the dragonboard from 96boards, that is using a Snapdragon SoC and has an Adreno GPU. https://www.96boards.org/product/dragonboard410c/

[macemoneta]

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Archi...7/Installation
You have a Raspi 3, a Pine64, a Hikey or a Dragonboard?

Because that seems to be the "list" of supported SBCs for Fedora, and the image installer does a different thing depending on what is the SBC selected.

Also, Pine64 and Hikey have a Mali GPU, so they can either package the blob or you won't use the 3D acceleration.

That appears to be the list of newly supported devices under Fedora 27. The complete list is most easily obtained by looking at the device tree, which lists 571 supported devices (so I'm not going to copy paste it here).

I'm using discontinued Allwinner A20 devices, which have a dual core CPU, 1GB RAM, two independent USB 2.0 ports, independent gigabit Ethernet and SATA. The boards were sold as discontinued on Amazon, for $15 each with free shipping (I bought three). As far as the GPU, I don't need that, so no blobs; my devices run headless as servers.

That's really the crux of the discussion; you buy a board based on its intended usage. Why pay for functionality you don't need in the application? My backup server doesn't need a GPU, so why use a board with a great GPU? Likewise, I see people buying an RPi so they can flip some GPIO and control relays. That's a task better performed by a microcontroller, like the esp8266 (under $2). For people that only have a hammer in their skill set, everything looks like a nail.

[starshipeleven]

That appears to be the list of newly supported devices under Fedora 27. The complete list is most easily obtained by looking at the device tree, which lists 571 supported devices (so I'm not going to copy paste it here).

I'm using discontinued Allwinner A20 devices, which have a dual core CPU, 1GB RAM, two independent USB 2.0 ports, independent gigabit Ethernet and SATA. The boards were sold as discontinued on Amazon, for $15 each with free shipping (I bought three). As far as the GPU, I don't need that, so no blobs; my devices run headless as servers.

For headless usage pretty much anything goes.

The big issue for support is GPU and media accelerator drivers, if you just want a headless system (no GPU nor media acceleration) you can get pretty much anything you want (I usually take NAS or routers supported by OpenWrt, as they come with a case, a power supply and are designed for a job), I said already that Allwinner stuff is mainlined and fine.

Also lol at them being "discontinued", you got a sweet deal there.

[macemoneta]

The big issue for support is GPU and media accelerator drivers

That depends on what you want to use it for. As long video isn't important, the open source drivers are fine. For example, if you're using it for software development, a lightweight desktop runs great. It's really only for something like Kodi that you need GPU support. I have an RPi for that purpose, but it's unfortunate that the USB and Ethernet share a single USB port bandwidth. If you want to see how bad it is, put your root filesystem on a thumbdrive and try to stream from Plex. The whole thing grinds to slow motion, and may even reboot.

[Michael_S]

Marvell Armada line is the newest from Marvell, but it's headless (no GPU usually), and not terribly common in consumer devices, afaik only NAS and router systems have them (and they have no GPU).

NXP has the iMX6 which has vivante GPU and QorIQ or other expensive stuff that lacks a GPU as it's for high-end networking. The refresh of the iMX6 lineup is the iMX8 which is what most opensource fans are waiting for.

Your best bet currently is iMX6-based stuff as they have Vivante GPU that has etnaviv open driver, (actually daughterboards for iMX6 SoMs) so Hummingboards and Wandboards and Gateworks Ventana afaik (probably more, wandboards now have their raspi clone with a iMX6 SoM, and headless ones with iMX7 that has an ARM M4 microcontroller instead). Their Gigabit eth is actually half-gigabit because of hardware limitations, which is still better than a Raspi anyway.

If you want to spend little money and can live without 3D acceleration (as 3D driver for Mali is a blob) and without media acceleration for a while, then you can look at Sunxi wiki's buying guide https://linux-sunxi.org/Buying_guide

There is also the dragonboard from 96boards, that is using a Snapdragon SoC and has an Adreno GPU. https://www.96boards.org/product/dragonboard410c/

Thanks for all of that, awesome.

[starshipeleven]

That depends on what you want to use it for. As long video isn't important, the open source drivers are fine.

Well, kind of. Lack of 3D acceleration means that anything more than a basic desktop doing text editing or showing still images will lag as it will overload the CPU. It will be much better if the CPU supports NEON instructions (media acceleration-ish instructions for CPU that ARM v7 and later have usually), but still meh.

Of course video beyond 720p won't play at all unless you have an octacore CPU that can actually deal with that in software decoding (again better if there is NEON support).

But it gets into a massive minefield where something can work decently something will lag, and something else may not even start at all, and for a "fun" or even practical project, it's not really worth it to save some 10$ and get frustrated at every corner.

If you need a graphical experience you should go with devices where the GPU is supported, so Raspi, iMX6-based stuff, and so on.

[starshipeleven]

Thanks for all of that, awesome.

Hm, forgot the x86 side. There are also raspi-like (and other similar sized) boards made with tablet-grade Atoms, and they are full blown PC systems with an UEFI firmware, priced competitively with the other Arm SBCs I mentioned above. UP Boards http://www.up-board.org/

But there you get the usual baggage, they have the ME just like most other Intel hardware, it is a bit cut down as it's in low-end hardware though.

[coder]

Hm, forgot the x86 side. There are also raspi-like (and other similar sized) boards made with tablet-grade Atoms, and they are full blown PC systems with an UEFI firmware, priced competitively with the other Arm SBCs I mentioned above. UP Boards http://www.up-board.org/

Speaking about GPUs and drivers, the fact that these use a standard Intel iGPU is one of the bigger selling points.