SBC's with better mainline Linux support than Raspberry Pi?

Cyclohexane@lemmy.mlmod to Linux@lemmy.ml – 69 points –

Rasbperry Pi is a popular choice as a SoC / SBC Linux board. But you have to use their custom linux kernel. Are there Linux boards with decent mainline Linux kernel support?

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Just google x86 SBCs and skip ARM. There are a bunch of options using AMD and Intel SoCs such as ODROID-H3.

You most likely do not want to run a mainline kernel / system. Run Armbian instead, it is Debian optimized for SBCs, it has a very good track record and sometimes is the only option after manufacturers stop creating images for their old boards.

Generic images / mainline kernel might underperform in your board, the GPIO and other low level components will, most likely, not work and you might burn your storage as logging and other I/O intensive operations aren’t tweaked for SD/eMMC. Armbian aims to fix all those issues and provides continuous system and kernel updates long after the manufacturer stops doing so.

run a mainline kernel

Having a board which is supported by mainline doesn't imply running a mainline kernel. Having mainline support is a huge advantage regardless of which kernel is run on a board.

Anything less than mainline support is ewaste imo. Look how terrible the pi graphics support used to be but now thanks to excellent upstream kernel/Mesa drivers it’s great and will continue to work/improve for the foreseeable future.

I sold my Odroid C2 or something, as there was no support anymore... didnt know much of Linux, I guess armbian woul have been fine?

Are you married to SBCs? There are dirt cheap, pretty powerful and small thin clients floating around in ebay. HP G3 mini for example.

Agree on this. Servethehome on YouTube has a series on different 1 litre PCs they review in detail.

Can't even being to agree enough on this. Unless you specifically need something that an SBC - ARM or X86 - offers, a second hand thin client or USFF computer will be a better fit, plus they come with high-quality power supplies and solid cases.

They seem to be the only product that occupies negligible space and is relatively affordable.

The other options are either more expensive or significantly larger.

Well, not really. The HP g3 mini is roughly the size of a paperback book and costs around 100€, depending on the specs. Similar devices of slightly older makes are even cheaper.

So, yes, they are physically larger, but still pretty small. Chances are, you don't actually need a tiny device like a Pi, so you should at least consider SFF PCs.

Who said that (you have to use their custom mainline kernel)?

Fedora have an IoT distribution that fits the Raspberry Pi for example. There's workstation and a ostree versions.

Armbian I've used in preference to Raspbian or whatever they call it today. I like the cleanest distributions as much as possible.

That's all I have personal experience with, but there are others.

Meanwhile, others have suggested other boards. However, don't think that Raspbian is it (pun intended).

Pine64 ROCKPro64: https://www.pine64.org/rockpro64/

DTS: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/arch/arm64/boot/dts/rockchip/rk3399-rockpro64.dtsi?id=e257da5715365b853439243f89cf5d8a9d382355

Thanks a lot! What does DTS mean?

Device Tree Source. It's a text description of the hardware. The kernel uses it to load and configure drivers. It's the most critical set of information for supporting any particular board.

my info could be out of date on this, but the last time i looked into it, the khadas vim3 was the most powerful arm sbc with mainline linux support.