Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

are you guys familiar with those tiny things?

i’m looking for one to pack a credit-card-size router/wifi/vpn/sftp/cardav server. reading online i see that:

-the raspberry pi has the most dedicated/helpful community and they actually develop drivers for the tiny thing.

-there’s a gazillion of other makes/names, they all run some bastardized version of lunix and most likely they won't be fun for anyone who cannot write his own driver.

i can do all of the router/wifi/vpn/sftp/cardav server with openwrt on my router and i was once able to install irix on the crybaby o2 in half an hour but no i cannot write my own device driver.

my confusion started with hardware and the associated specs. my router’s specs are:



and it does all i need the small box to do. all 3 routers are up and running for years, never had any problem so far. however, to my understanding, those single-board computers are more computer-esque rather than router-esque in terms of OS optimisation (or whatever you call it). so the ones that won’t run openwrt out of the box, will most likely come with some full-blown version of lunix: gui, bells, dinosaurs and that 1GB ram limit will likely start behaving funny.

my requirements are:

• small-size (must fit in the backpack with the basics),
• durable case (this will spend most of its life outdoors),
• 2 network interfaces (1 eth / 1 wifi),
• muscles to handle openvpn/ssh tunnels,
• compatible with openwrt (i can manage this myself just fine, yay!).

what would you suggest?


update: baseline specs + requirements

a third sticker applied just under the previous sticker:

out for holidays

fu wrote: i’m looking for one to pack a credit-card-size router/wifi/vpn/sftp/cardav server.

PC Engines APU.1D running pfSense. All industry-standard hardware, no special drivers needed. It is slightly bigger than a credit card...

-the raspberry pi has the most dedicated/helpful community and they actually develop drivers for the tiny thing.

As a router?? ethernet performance is horrible

-there’s a gazillion of other makes/names, they all run some bastardized version of lunix and most likely they won't be fun for anyone who cannot write his own driver.

Some are running mainline distributions. It depends on cluefulness of the vendor.
This one is $9 and runs Debian (no ethernet though, but it's the same situation with RPi, you are forced to stuff ethernet through USB)

i can do all of the router/wifi/vpn/sftp/cardav server with openwrt on my router and i was once able to install irix on the crybaby o2 in half an hour but no i cannot write my own device driver.

I don't really see the issue. All the pico-computers come with functioning linux systems or can run standard installs. If you were trying to do this on an ESP8266 or Tiny I could see how you'd have a problem.

@robespierre thanks heaps man, again

as long as it’s a standard install + some kind of written instructions/manual, i can boogie.

i read that the new pi sports a 64bit cpu but it actually runs on 32bit code. same for other makes, and that’s when i usually ask nekochaners for advice.

i’m talking to a good friend about this, trying to figure out the hype and the real. for all i know in order to dive into the greatness and wideness of 64bit you gotta have more than 4gb of ram. now every new tiny board jumps on the 64bit hype but they come with either 1gb or 2gb or ram.

i mean, is there any way (masturbating to specs aside) that this makes sense? did things get so optimized?



@ivelegacy nice flair juggling your fading stickers, Cinecittà used to be a home for me. asa nisi masa

64-bit integer math can be an advantage for some programs, and the x86-64 instruction set is more regular, which helps optimization.
For example, you can compute an offset into a >4GB file without gyrations (and even do it in regular C code).

^ check; till i get my head around it

and while looking around:

this is known to work reliably: http://tinyurl.com/na7akp2

and this is the "new" 64bit: http://tinyurl.com/zvnhpjg

ODROID-XU4 vs ODROID-C2, ARM machines
but the first one comes with a funny sticker

in HMP I trust

_____Heterogeneous
__________Multi
_______________Processing

ivelegacy

you gonna play nice and explain things to me or i open the bag of tools and send you down the rabbit hole

it's MIPS topic, but Arm knows what it can do-u-u-u: loooooooooliiiiiiinnnnn , can't get you out of my head , like a pop-dance song by Kylie Minogue , as it's more hot than an explosive experience with a sizzling backdrop in the spirit of the Moulin Rouge of Paris. Oh yeah, when a guy says " loooooooniiiiiix ", it's so exciting (especially on ARM) that …. in my head ... I have to imagine up to twenty Moulin Rouge-dancer-girls naked under the shower, which worth the compare with forty four rubbit-girls and eighty eight pon pons in the wonderland, in order to have an equal excitement

in my head, they are dancing in a circle, in my head " HMP " sounds like a group of four heterogeneous blonde-Cheerleaders, each one with a letter on her t-shirt

girl1 says "give me H "
girl2 says "… give me O "
girl3 says "…… give me P "
girl4 says "……… give me E "

.H.O.P.E. Hole On, Pains End

ivelegacy wrote: mini epiphany cluster, 4 Parallella boards stacked on MPI

I was pretty much beside myself laughing when Andreas showed off his 10x Parallella "supercomputer" in 2014. That's right kids, just take a pile of boards and hook them up to a Netgear switch, and you've got yourself a supercomputer!
Just when you thought you could wash the taste of "Beowulf" out of your ears! I even heard it "smokes" a Cray!

Extra irony because his chip/board does have low-latency interconnect/fabric. But even the inventor can't figure out how to make it work in small-scale MMP or ccNUMA is pretty damning.

@ive welcome aboard young dadaist, i had a hunch we’ll reach an understanding

since you might be wandering:

we used to have members here from all backgrounds, i once wasn’t the only one who couldn’t write his own driver.

a decade later there’s a bunch of people here that i trust their opinion and i ask for their advice. i grew up on paint, canvas and film they grew up on soldering irons, machinery and processors. they give me honest feedback for my rather simplistic needs; i do the same when they ask me about a camera to take with them while travelling. i’d go and test some tiny cameras if possible, i’ll never recommend the latest thing just because it comes with more megapixels.

if for reasons of taxonomy (you mention MIPS vs ARM) you’d prefer the last posts split in a different topic, please ask a moderator to do so. i wasn’t aware that they belong to a different family, sorry about that.

fu wrote: @ive welcome aboard young dadaist, i had a hunch we’ll reach an understanding

new word learnt: artistic anarchy that challenged the social, political and cultural values of the time.
hey yo? that's me

fu wrote: if for reasons of taxonomy (you mention MIPS vs ARM) you’d prefer the last posts split in a different topic, please ask a moderator to do so. i wasn’t aware that they belong to a different family, sorry about that.

not the point, buddy

MIPS is the weak ring of the RISC family, everybody loves A dvanced R isc M achines , as easily as, everybody hates Ned Flanders , they say - they love you when you are on the covers, and when you are not they love another - thus, since the raspberry-PI , and oragne-PI , and banana-PI , all these fruits are on the covers, more than the top ten " Tutti Frutti " by Elvis Presley

I gotta go, can’t stop,
Down to the candy shop.

ARM candy, ohh yeah

while MIPS …. is going into extinction, like dinos, it survives relegated into routers, like a soft reincarnation (MIPS32? MIPS64?), it survives even if it gets no love from people, because things like routers come sold by chineses for few bucks (say less than a chips bag, TL703? 10 USD, OMG) and hidden somewhere in the living room, like dwarfs in the deep cave

thus the point is: ARM everywhere is boring, and the last Cortex implementation has become less elegant and more complex than the arm60 we had by Acorn on PIE60 boards, and I'd like to see an huge MIPS computer on my desktop with billion cores, iMac shaped, 17" inc LCD, with an interface with Zynq fpga (by Xilinx) and a few Epiphany IV chip, each with no less than 4096 cores

extra excitement bonus if equipped with Haiku/OS instead of looooooooooooooonix/OS , which is almost exciting like an autograph by Giovanna Maria Pataniello

The posts are still focused on MIPS desktops, but if one would compare these against other (ARM) architectures, i would suggest making a new topic discussing this.

EDIT: topic split from viewtopic.php?f=8&t=16730474

And don't worry fu

@dex, please split the posts after my first question to a separate topic and move it to wherever you see fit

i usually miss the technical terminology; and this time didn’t start a new topic because of ivelegacy’s mention of the other tiny computer in this thread.

mea culpa

about odroid-xu4 , I have opened here a topic (EEVBlog forum), asking users for their feedbacks

@ive thanks

since you develop your own software take a look @this forum . it’s mostly dev-talk about the xu4: patching, hacking and funking around with the board.

after reading some in there i see that heat brings lots of them to an end, and that 4-week guarantee doesn’t look promising either. of course, you could cook things on your own, stretch+flex hardware around so ymmv.

me being me i should get a pi but robespierre is right everyone complains about the speed of the ethernet port and having usb-2-ethernet adaptors spaghettified left+right of the tiny case breaks the compact credit-card-size solution i’m after.

gonna research some more and come back with further findings.

I want to like the rpi, I really do, but I have yet to purchase one. For most of the recommended use cases I am old-school and cling to a trusty AVR or similar mcu. If there's something that can't be done with an 8-bit chip, may as well haul out a real computer. (E.g. For routing, why not buy a real router. Media streaming, an apple tv or chromestick or embedded plex box or games console. Etc)

It's squeezed on both sides (MCU and PC) for me, both sides which already have an overlap.

If they made a rpi with built in gsm modem, I would be all over it. But even then, it couldn't possibly compete with a lumia 635 or an even cheaper android. As it is, I see the newest models have finally added wifi/ble

oh c’mon syb, we didn’t meet yesterday

guardian452 wrote: For most of the recommended use cases I am old-school and cling to a trusty AVR or similar mcu. If there's something that can't be done with an 8-bit chip, may as well haul out a real computer. (E.g. For routing, why not buy a real router. Media streaming, an apple tv or chromestick or embedded plex box or games console. Etc)

you know i’m like that and pretty strict with the damn tools or out of the window they fly. i’ve found out that a real router like the one @home/office ain’t portable and the really small ones won’t handle the openvpn tunnels. so i started looking at those single-boards.

the Pi has the most helpful community/documentation, i’d have gotten one but everyone says that its eth port is crippled to the point that routing lots of packets is a terrible idea.

thanks to the man behind the great firewall, i’ve finally gone for a board called cubietruck , the only one to sport a metal case , meet the requirements and in stock right there. currently in transit, it will get tested on the road and on ancient locations this summer :)

on the software side, here’s a recap of what i’ve found so far:

• armbian and its supported hardware
  
• DietPi supports a bunch of single-boards. mostly used for xbmc/media centre solutions ( full list of software ).
  
• Docker on Raspberry Pi
  
• The Reference of Raspberry Pi Downloads