What would it cost to fund swe and design professionals to write a 9front port with a haiku skinjob to hit milestones at 9, 18, 27 month intervals? the incubation period for Macintosh, NeXTSTEP, BeOS, HarmonyOS Next would have estimates.
As someone trying to port 9front onto a similar board, I can tell you firsthand that it is not trivial (I actually did that because it was “simpler” than porting Haiku, but then the Haiku folk point blank refused to have anything to do with the precursor build scripts because the README had emoji and I do use Codex, and… it’s a very long story… I decided to not waste tokens on Luddites)
But I will get 9front going, it’s already loading the kernel.
(Ironically, I came here to comment that the review is completely unreadable with the amount of ad inserts - almost one per paragraph!)
If I could find a 6GB Q6A in stock (or Radxa eMMC, or fan-powered case, or most Radxa products in general) I would celebrate this announcement but they seem to be in small batch mode right now.
I hope Linux support for these chips matures quickly. Qualcomm's laptop chips are the only serious competitor to Apple's M-series in single core performance and power efficiency. Intel and AMD are both far behind.
I want to be able to buy ARM boards like I'm buying ITX PC boards. I don't want a special build of Linux from the SBC OEM, I don't want weird bootloaders, firmware and other embedded-like stuff. I just want an ARM-based PC board for my desktop and server closet (so Ampere stuff is out of the picture unfortunately).
I bought a Radxa Cubie A7A over the weekend because my homelab machine of 5 months threw an SSD and I wanted something to limp along with while I wait for a replacement. I was a bit nervous about the special builds, driver issues, etc but didn't really run into any significant issues (or if I did, Claude took them in stride). And it was a very good test of the Ansible Playbook I'd thrown together over time to rebuild the system from scratch. Was missing a number of small things, but it should be rock solid by the time (if) the other company gets a new drive to me.
I’m baffled by the current state of Linux for ARM where every board needs a special .dtb/.dts to describe its hardware and, often, peripherals, rather than there being some kind of self-describing plug-and-play-ish system like has been standard on other mainstream architectures since the ’90s.
I have been tinkering with the Windows Dev Kit 2023 which shares the same SoC as this board. Linux support has been improving but with only third party kernel patches. GPU support has been okay but I have noticed oddities at higher resolutions. Speaking of, none of the display port options could provide 4K at 120Hz so maybe this is one area that the Q8B can prove to be more capable; it is supposed to have an HDMI 2.1 port and two DP 1.4 capable usb-c ports.
This exactly the missing laptop/lowend desktop performance bracket missing in the ARM ecosystem. Make a Mini-ITX compatible board for the SoC, upstream drivers into mainline Linux (and *BSD), and people will buy it as the low power 24/7 board for the home. Is it so fucking hard not shoot yourself in both feet?
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 40.8 ms ] threadBut I will get 9front going, it’s already loading the kernel.
(Ironically, I came here to comment that the review is completely unreadable with the amount of ad inserts - almost one per paragraph!)
I wonder if 802.3ad bonding can bring 5gbit/s
Apparently we might be able to run OpenBSD on it [0]
FreeBSD is unclear [1]
- [0] https://www.openbsd.org/arm64.html
- [1] https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=267292