Canonical Makes The DragonBoard 410c Its Reference Ubuntu Core ARM64 Platform

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Canonical Makes The DragonBoard 410c Its Reference Ubuntu Core ARM64 Platform

Canonical has announced they are making a 64-bit ARM developer environment based on Ubuntu Core and will use the DragonBoard 410c as its reference platform...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-Core-Dragonboard

[andreano]

I wish they compiled PPAs for arm.

[speculatrix]

Yet another "so close, so far" boards.. There's always one major flaw that stops these cheap arm boards being great.. just 1 GB ram, what year is this, 2010?

[Cerberus]

Yet another "so close, so far" boards.. There's always one major flaw that stops these cheap arm boards being great.. just 1 GB ram, what year is this, 2010?

This board is mainly intended for IoT and embedded purposes, 1 GB RAM should be more than enough for these purposes.

[andreano]

What a waste of a powerful processor then! This processor (or the Hikey one) should be more useful in a proper non-IoT board like Novena or Nitrogen6x. These are even hitting the 4GiB memory limit already (so would actually need 64bit ARMv8 soon). I have a Nitrogen6x myself, and it could need some more juice.

I guess Linaro has played a part in the choice of board, as this board is just the latest to follow their "96boards" spec.
I'm not so fond of the part of the spec about physical restrictions, since it apparently tends to create awkwardly restricted boards.

Looks like Shuttleworth is sponsoring one of the Novena devs

[SystemCrasher]

I wish they compiled PPAs for arm.

That's up for PPA authors. Main repos are actually come with ARM packages and at least on ARMv7 it is getting hard to distinguish between x86 or ARM. Basically the very same programs are in repos, so unless you're doing cat /proc/cpuinfo you could fail to notice it is ARM. Uhm, ok, installation could be different, etc.

P.S. btw, it isn't exactly wise for canonical to grab some exotic, non-widespread and not anyhow opernsource friendly board as "reference".

[SystemCrasher]

What a waste of a powerful processor then! This processor (or the Hikey one) should be more useful in a proper non-IoT board

Feel free to manufacture whatever board you want to. Internet of things and related applications surely have large future, and people are kinda fed up with custom RTOSes, etc. So Linux is going to be popular for small devices with advanced networking, neat web interface and so on. These Linux things now can be as small as 2x2 cm or so, so it going to be fun