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lgeek on May 28, 2014 | parent | context | favorite | on:
Radxa: $100 Quad-Core ARM Raspberry Pi Alternative
I've been hacking Rockchip RK3188-
based devices for a few months now.
What caught my attention are the low
cost Android PC-on-a-stick and tablets
using this SoC. We're talking about
$50-ish delivered for a PC-on-a-stick
with 2GB of RAM, HDMI output and a
WiFi+Bluetooth adapter and $150-$200
for a decently built tablet with similar
specs, some even having high-DPI
screens.
Radxa Rock (the article keeps talking
about 'the Radxa' when that's the name
of the company selling Radxa Rock, by
the way) is similar to the various PC-
on-a-stick, but in a development board
form factor and with more I/Os and
GPIO exposed.
Rockchip only provides support for
Android and more recently Chrome OS,
with GNU/Linux support being mostly
community developed. The good news
is that most hardware is working on
GNU/Linux, with the exception of the
video decoder and encoder (which is
typical for most SoCs)and the NAND
driver is closed source because it
includes the flash translation layer
which is treated as a trade secret by
flash vendors. The bad news is that the
kernel code developed by Rockchip is a
bit crap and the community forks are
quite fragmented because there's no
central place to centralize various
patches. Even so, it's generally
straightforward to add support for a
new board. We have a wiki[0] and an
IRC channel - #linux-rockchip on
Freenode if you're interested. The
Radxa guys maintain their own fork so
at least for their platform it's clear what
to use.
I'd say it's a good choice for running
Android or for hacking or for doing
processing tasks (things like a building
packages, running a low power
webserver, continuous integration, etc)
on GNU/Linux.
Some people in this thread
ask/complain about platform-specific
GNU/Linux distributions. There's
Picuntu[1], but my view is that
platform-specific distros are completely
unnecessary and even a bit silly. On
x86 you don't run Thinkpad-Ubuntu,
you just run the generic Ubuntu. This is
no different for ARM computers, you
can use any generic distribution with a
ARM port, with a kernel image compiled
for your hardware and maybe one or
two other drivers which need to be set
up in userspace.
Compared to RPi, RK3188 (and other
similar SoC) devices have a massive
advantage since it's ARMv7 while RPi is
ARMv6 which most distros don't
support anymore. The difference in CPU
performance compared to Raspberry
can't be understated, it has 4 cores
which are maybe 2 to 4 times faster for
most workloads, about three times the
memory bandwidth, four times the
RAM, etc.
[0] http://linux-rockchip.info/ [1]
http://home.g8.net/
kbart on May 29, 2014 [–]
Did you manage find full RK3188 TRM?
I would be interested to play with
GNU/Linux on this board, but there's
not much you can do without a decent
documentation..
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