96Boards Updates Site With EE, HuskyBoard Details

[phoronix]

Phoronix: 96Boards Updates Site With EE, HuskyBoard Details

AMD's HuskyBoard still isn't shipping even though it was originally supposed to launch last year as a developer board powered by their ARMv8-based Opteron SoC. While the LeMaker Cello is moving forward as an ARM developer board using the Opteron A1100, 96Boards recently updated their web-site with new Enterprise Edition (EE) board details...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=96Boards-EE-Husky-Details

[Michael_S]

So forgive me for being obtuse, but with two DDR3 SO-DIMM slots it can support 16GB of memory? Sounds like fun to play with. $300 for only the board and processor isn't great - obviously you can get a good Intel CPU and board for less. But these guys aren't benefiting from the Intel and motherboard vendor economies of scale either.

[starshipeleven]

that, and also the fact that this is aimed at enterprise. For a dev board with the features it offers, it's pretty cheap though.

I've seen total crap SoCs whose devboards cost 2-3k $

I hope it's not using a UEFI firmware but just a simple bootloader.

[Min1123]

I preordered the Cello as soon as I was able to (maybe the second day). It was about $50 in shipping and handling to Maryland, U.S.A., so it's got a bit of overhead there too. Still, I'm looking forward to it.

I thought I really liked UEFI on PCs, but my latest SkyLake with its motherboard has all manner of trouble running Linux (kernels as early as 3.10 and as late as 4.5) due to horrible bugs in its ACPI from its UEFI. On my 96Boards HiKey the UEFI is also pretty bad, so now I'm leaning more towards u-Boot with DTD support, but that isn't a silver bullet either (especially with no video support until the OS is running on most of them). There are too many non-standard things with all the boot processes for ARM and ARMv8, and it needs to be better than it is.

If u-Boot could standardize around a boot.ini format of some sort (I'm partial to YAML myself) and bring up basic USB Mass Storage/HID, eMMC, SD/MMC, video output mirrored on all video outputs, and serial I/O, then I think I'd want it as the new best thing since sliced bread. Sadly, as it is forked all over the place and put in with minimal functionality, I think it'll still be tough for a while on all of that.

[darkblu]

Alas, gone are the days of CHRP (where the device trees idea originates from).

[starshipeleven]

Sadly, as it is forked all over the place and put in with minimal functionality, I think it'll still be tough for a while on all of that.

https://boundarydevices.com/u-boot-d...ort-for-i-mx6/

http://u-boot.10912.n7.nabble.com/U-...-td157916.html

u-boot can show stuff on screen since a while back, stop crying about nonsense.

Of course you need a board that gives you a driver that it can actually use (the biggest issue so far, integrating the average multiMB blob into u-boot is uncool), it just needs a dumbed-down framebuffer driver to show console, no 2D/3D of course.

If u-Boot could standardize around a boot.ini format of some sort (I'm partial to YAML myself) and bring up basic USB Mass Storage/HID, eMMC, SD/MMC,

uhm, uboot has scripting ability.

I automate device initialization, device search, partition search, it figures out what filesystem it is working with, and so on. As long as there is something with a partition called "rootfs" it will get booted.

Wanna see my spells?

[Max Payne]

The extras 2 sata ports seems nice when compared to lemaker's offer, since it would allow a raid 10 setup, assuming their sata controller supports it.

[miskol]

I want to see benchmar of this vs nvida shield as they both use 4xcore Cortex-A57

[robclark]

I hope it's not using a UEFI firmware but just a simple bootloader.

It'll be UEFI. Otoh it can install/boot the rhel arm builds out of the box (including a kernel that was built months before the hardware existed.. I don't think you'll ever see something like that happen w/ DT+uboot that you get in the mobile space)

[starshipeleven]

It'll be UEFI. Otoh it can install/boot the rhel arm builds out of the box (including a kernel that was built months before the hardware existed.. I don't think you'll ever see something like that happen w/ DT+uboot that you get in the mobile space)

Heh, I kinda saw that coming. Still like to dream about a UEFI-less world...