So you want to make a Raspberry Pi killer | Hacker News Reader

So you want to make a Raspberry Pi killer

jeffgeerling.com

44 pointsvquemener23 comments

How about software support that's not download this Ubuntu distribution that's Ubuntu but not and only available from a site that may disappear tomorrow?

Or basic driver support? I have an orange pizzle and it has a software mouse cursor with mind blowing amounts of flicker. Hardware cursor was a solved problem 30 years, wtf is this???

Do modern graphics cards still have hardware cursor support? I was pretty sure stuff like that went the way of sprite tables, once the hardware gets fast enough you don't need those dedicated 'trick' subunits any more, you just redraw the screen.

I think that modern desktop GPUs do in fact still have hardware cursors; I recall digging into this before. The reason isn't speed or power usage, it's latency. The cursor position of a hardware cursor can be changed during the scan-out, which means that it can be significantly more up-to-date than the framebuffer itself. It's a pretty big deal for something feeling 'usable' and that's definitely why VMs and remote desktops will go through extra effort to make the cursor feel lower latency (remote desktops will outright fake it, while VMs will forward hardware cursor support through the guest to the host.) If you use an older computer with a CRT and no compositor, the lack of latency is marked; it makes it feel like things are happening before you even do them, and things feel "snappier" sometimes even when they're obviously a lot slower.

edit: Also, on Windows, you can notice the presence of the hardware cursor because Windows has an additional trick: it will switch to a software cursor when dragging windows, so that the window and the cursor stay synced up. However, since it doesn't perfectly sync the hardware cursor turning off with the software cursor frame being presented, you'll usually see a very subtle flicker when you first start dragging a window. I dunno if this still applies to fully-updated Windows, but it still applied last I checked, in Windows 10. (And once you notice this, boy, you never stop noticing it. It takes a second.. then it's hard to ever not see it again.)

> Also, on Windows, you can notice the presence of the hardware cursor because Windows has an additional trick

That's pretty interesting, I played with that and did notice it.

Also from googling if you set 'MouseTrails' to -1 in the registry it's a hack which disables the hardware cursor, not sure if that's still current.

A lot of modern mobile GPUs have hardware plane support in the display controller. These kind of act like more versatile hardware cursors that can display any kind of data and also apply transformations to it. Afaik this is used for hardware cursors now.

Good read. I think it's a phenomenon that applies to many things (such as Linux distros). Your technical on-paper specs aren't as important as the community, support, maturity, etc.

The software argument only really concerns the hobbyist/"maker" crowd. No professionally-designed device will be using Raspbian/Armbian/etc (or any kind of general-purpose Linux distro). It'll be a Yocto/buildroot custom image or maybe customized OpenWrt - things designed to operate as an embedded, immutable "appliance" instead of a general-purpose distro.

Heh... there are soooo many 'industrial' devices that just have some files added to a default Pi OS, Debian, etc. image.

A lot of times the smaller hardware-driven companies (who may charge $3000+ for a Pi-integrated solution) have very robust hardware... and software that I'm surprised works at all.

There's a lot of companies that have a combination of bad hardware and bad software and only small amount of those with either good hardware or software.

There's no reason a 'professional' company can't build their product around Armbian and ship it.

Yocto is not as great as it seems. You can go a long way with stock Armbian.

You can't. The RPi ecosystem is driven by subsidization to prevent a viable competitor from emerging.

You can either pay real prices or you can bitch and whine when the RPi overlords allocate your chips to people who pay real money.

Those of us who get this already use something else.

I don't think so. Companies out of China can compete on price and they do, sometimes with even better hardware.

The key, indeed, is software, documentation, ease of use.

> Those of us who get this already use something else.

What is the 'something else' that you would recommend?

Subsidized by whom?

Broadcom.

There are a lot of boards out there that have better hardware than the Pi but they fall down with bad software.

No mention of the lack of opnesource GPU drivers?

I know someone with an Orange Pi 5 and everything he needs works, except the GPU. A lot of SBCs are fine if all you want to do is run headless software on them. The armbian images come with reasonably good hardware drivers. But now that panfrost has stopped development for the newest generation of Mali GPUs, there is no hope for the Orange Pi 5 to be anything, but a paperweight.

> - The locked-down proprietary Broadcom firmware

> - The quirky VideoCore GPU-based boot process (see first point)

I mention that regarding the Pi, but sometimes the opposite happens on other SBCs; there's some open / 'mainline' development that happens (usually community-driven), but at some point the manufacturer just stops caring about a board... and then it's crickets.

And you're left with hardware running outdated software or possibly someone's handcrafted distro that gets about 60% of the hardware working (hope it's the parts you need!).

At least as of last week, people (mainly at Collabora) are working on open-source support for Mali “Valhall” including the GPU in Orange Pi 5. It’s just sufficiently different from previous generations to need a new driver, and taking a while to develop.

Apart from one-of DIY board bring-up, rather than add yet another SBC to the market, buy something with Ryzen Embedded. The end.

I’m not sure Ryzen Embedded is the answer to every SBC use case. Even the budget V3000 line comes with 2x 10 GbE, 20 lanes of PCIe and 8 cores. Does an elevator controller [0], e-scooter [1] or a kiosk need that much power? Doubtful. There is plenty of room for low power Arm SOCs.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37016842

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37016842

There's an obvious market for "wildly unbalanced" microcontrollers.

The actual "elevator controller" or "e-scooter controller" or whatever would run fine on a Z80, but it has to pull something from the cloud (config file, activation unlock). Suddenly, you need a MCU big enough to talk to Wifi/BT/cellular modem, and handle TCP/IP/SSL, and you're looking at ARM and x86 parts.

Something like the "wi-fi modem" concept you see for retrocomputing might be interesting. A black-box component that handles all the connectivity, you pre-program it with the specs of the network transfer, and it exposes the controls and UI for "select wi-fi network/pair bluetooth/etc". On the MCU's side, it would just have a very basic serial or parallel interface, that 8-bit tooling could handle easily.

Never made such an absurd claim, you did by strawman. There's plenty of room for different things. There are too many boards already in high and low niches. That's the point.

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