[kwlug-disc] Fw: Raspberry pi 4

[Chris Irwin]

On Tue, Dec 7, 2021, at 13:54, Mark Steffen wrote:
> One other thing I like about the Odroid N2+ and Pine64 Quartz which is 
> lacking in the Pi is support for eMMC modules (up to 128GB) -- much 
> faster (~150MB/sec read and about half that for write) and more reliable 
> than sdcards, though M.2 NVME 2280 support would be preferred of course.
> 

The advantage of a Pi isn't the performance, but the popularity.

I've owned another non-pi ARM board, which required it's own out-of-tree patches and basically became ewaste once newer products came along.

Pis are very popular, leading to a lot of eyes and hands getting things upstream. A lot of Pi images are widely cross-compatible between old & new devices, as well as variants (Zero, etc). There's also projects like the Pi4 UEFI loader that let generic arm distros be used, meaning I don't need to try to find a specific Pi version of whatever OS I want to use (Fedora Server, in my case). I can download and run an installer just like on any x86 system.

FWIW, Pi4 can boot from USB, removing the requirement to use SD cards. Personally, I put still put the UEFI bootloader on an old SD card, but I installed the OS onto a USB-attached SSD.

Also, my comparative experiences between the Pi4 & PinePhone reinforces my believe that UEFI on ARM needs to become something we expect of ARM systems. We shouldn't need to download system-specific images in this day and age.

-- 
*Chris Irwin*

email:   chris at chrisirwin.ca
 xmpp:   chris at chrisirwin.ca
  web: https://chrisirwin.ca
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://kwlug.org/pipermail/kwlug-disc_kwlug.org/attachments/20211207/f7f5ec86/attachment.htm>