Radxa Rock 5 ITX: 8-Core ARM Mini ITX Board with LPDDR5 RAM | Hacker News Reader

Radxa Rock 5 ITX: 8-Core ARM Mini ITX Board with LPDDR5 RAM

bret.dk

43 pointssthlmb59 comments

When these ARM boards start coming with UEFI and I don't need to hunt around for blessed OS images with patched kernels I'll be a lot more interested, until then I've got to stick with x86 to maintain my sanity.

Same thing I'm thinking as well when it comes to ARM PC's, being restricted to a specifically patched distro is very limiting.

It's also bad for the planet as it artificially restricts the lifetime in which a board can be used.

This as well. In comparison, you can repurpose any old x86 PC rather easily.

How do we know it doesn't? I didn't see any info in the linked page about the system firmware, though I could easily have missed it.

UEFI is not enough if you don't have all the drivers in the OS image, especially the GPU drivers. Last year I bought a cheap Windows Qualcomm 8xx ARM tablet on sale and it was very nice for the money but I returned it when none of the ARM Linux ISOs I found online could boot on it despite the tablet having UEFI support, because Qualcomm.

Booting Linux distros out of the box is such a non-issue on X86 that we take it for granted when on ARM it's just a pipe dream.

If the ARM PC future is all proprietary custom firmware blobs that need to patched for each SoC/motherboard for Linux to boot, then you can keep them, I'll stick to X86 thank you very much.

Part of the point of UEFI is to support a graphical framebuffer and HID devices (keyboard and mouse) out of the box, that's what powers the fancy BIOS setup screens on newer PC's. Hardware-specific drivers are supposed to be optional.

Can I run X or Wayland with the UEFI framebuffer?

It should - linux's simpledrm driver should work with uefi framebuffers using the "standard" user interfaces.

Right, you need reasonable firmware (boot path and device enumeration) and to actually have the drivers upstreamed. Both necessary, neither sufficient alone. (Although, either one alone still a massive improvement over the usual)

FWIW, there is a port of EDK2 to the RK3588, which is what powers this board. Most of the peripherals work. So that's nice. But the thing is, it isn't UEFI so much as the device-tree/ACPI distinction you need to be mindful of. ARM systems use both methods (whereas everything on x86 is ACPI.) You can use either DTBs (kernel configuration option) or ACPI to boot Linux on this device, though. https://github.com/edk2-porting/edk2-rk3588

Bingo. Basically ARM SystemReady SR or gtfo.

In practice that means Ampere Altra CPU. There was a uatx board released recently that seems viable, if bit pricy.

https://www.servethehome.com/asrock-rack-altrad8ud-1l2t-revi...

https://www.arm.com/architecture/system-architectures/system...

RK3588 has pretty good mainline kernel support

Does KMS/Mesa support the GPU yet? I know they've been working at it.

They should be getting support soon: https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/03/05/panthor-open-source-...

That's what I heard a year ago... Looks like it is seeing progress, which is good.

A tiny subset of UEFI would be nice (ability to load files from a fat32/exfat/something partition, framebuffer, memory map). Also a subset of ACPI (enumeration of PCI devices) and XHCI (enumeration of USB devices). That's enough of a starting point where you can load drivers, and show the user an error if there's unknown hardware.

No PCIe connectivity is very unfortunate. I think these ARM/RISC-V SBCs are very attractive in combination with high-throughput NICs (or if you're into AI, things like the Tenstorrent cards). That'd be very nice for building smaller prototypes of 100G+ edge compute, CDNs, cloud, serverless platforms etc. without having to shell out for an Ampere Altra (or x86 equivalent).

Nowadays there's such a big move towards heterogeneity that good PCIe connectivity feels like table stakes for SBCs.

I'm a bit confused by the wording on PoE:

> If you choose to power via PoE you can expect to get 25W of output.

Can you power this device via PoE ("choose to power via PoE"), or can this SBC power other devices over PoE ("expect to get 25W of output")? I clicked through some other reviews, but didn't see it addressed.

The article says there are three ways to power it. The ATX power supply connector, a DC barrel jack, and some third way not specified.

It does have a USB3 port so that might be it, or it could be PoE. Very unclear from the couple of articles.

Ah, you power this device via PoE and it can then draw up to 25W from a PoE switch feeding it. You cannot power another device via PoE with the ROCK 5 ITX as the source

Not sure if this was added or edited later, but the linked article clarifies:

ROCK 5 ITX Power over Ethernet (PoE) Here we can see that the PoE module is not soldered in and connects using 8 pins which is quite nice. If you choose to power the ROCK 5 ITX via a PoE switch (the ROCK 5 ITX doesn’t provide PoE power to another device) you can expect to get 25W of power budget for the system itself and any peripherals/devices you plan to power from the boards connectors.

(my summary of that quoted section:) So, you can power the board with PoE, which will give the board and any connected devices 25W of power budget. Without looking at the specs of the CPU/GPU, that's probably enough to run at least one m.2 drive and a couple USB peripherals?

I'd love something like this with socketed RAM so much, the only ARM boards I've seen with socketed RAM so far are high-end expensive server stuff.

They did mention on their forums that a ROCK 6 ITX would likely come with socketed RAM but that's not likely to be until later this year sadly

It's always the software that's the missing element.

I prefer low end Intel compatible boards because the software just works. I spent too many hours with weird arm devices trying to get them to do basic stuff that is taken for granted on Intel, such as booting up.

Anybody have a clue what the price point will be? This board seems pretty neat as a SFF PC replacement, but not so much if it costs $500 or more.

I've been looking at these kinds of boards as well: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2024/02/10/2000

So far, mostly the same results, although I do have another with much more RAM that I'm still writing a draft on.

Why Not Smaller?

Why is this board so (physically) large in size?

You can see how much wasted space, by looking at this photo:

https://bret.dk/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/radxa_rock_5_itx_...

Its as large as the IO Panel. Also that space is for an M2 drive, no?

Yes, those are the mounting holes for the M.2 that's connected to the left of the photo (visible in other photos)

But Pico-ITX boards exist with M.2 support.

And those boards are about 1/3rd the size of Mini-ITX

https://www.aaeon.com/en/p/pico-itx-boards-amd-ryzen-v2000-p...

That board is double-sided: the CPU and the SSD slot are on the back, while this ITX board has all the connectors and the processor on the top. That makes a difference both for the complexity and cost of building the board, and the complexity of assembling a system with the board, heatsinks and all.

But there aren't really generic Pico-ITX cases are there? What's the point of designing a Pico-ITX board if you need a custom case anyways? Just use the Radxa Rock 5B at that point.

I don't think they were saying that it has to be that big to fit an M.2 drive on it, they're pointing out that in the picture you shared, that space is for the M.2 NVMe drive to be mounted in

This is aimed at desktop use. I guess it would be hard to mount if it was smaller than mini-ITX spec and/or wouldn't mount firmly on some/many desktop cases.

Why not bigger? Why not a full-size ITX mainboard? There's no pleasing everyone.

Your point stands, but I don't think there is such a thing as full-size ITX; Mini-ITX is the largest ITXl; Mini-ITX is backwards compatable with ATX, so perhaps you meant "full-size ATX?"

The whole point of this product is that it is standard ITX sized. Radxa has several sibling products with smaller footprints, e.g. Rock 5C https://radxa.com/products/rock5/5c/

Because the form factor is the point of this board. There are already other smaller SBCs with the same SoC but with much less connectivity.

tkaiser has some additional information from his initial testing at https://github.com/ThomasKaiser/Knowledge/blob/master/articl... if people are curious to know more, though it should be noted these were early release samples and as such, software/firmware isn't exactly perfect at the moment

Too bad it doesn't have PCIe slots. It could be interesting as a low-end 10Gb/e storage/web server if it had enough I/O.

2x 2.5Gb/s interfaces are pretty chunky on this spec of board, isn't it?

I have a board with a 16 core A78 serving static content via 100Gb/s (encrypted via ktls, offloaded to the NIC).

My arm fu is not good, so I'm not sure how a quad-core A76 compares.

What board is that?

A78 is a couple generations newer.

Nvidia Bluefield3

The BF3 is a DPU, not an SBC right? Or can it be operated without a host? I'm curious about your setup.

It can be operated w/o a host. It offers the ability to connect 16 lanes (or is it 32?) of PCIe Gen5. It has a 1 GbE management port, a BMC running OpenBMC, and a 400GbE NIC that does crypto offload.

The debug environment is FANTASTIC.. you can remote attach a gdb, set breaks, and step through bootup. It made it super easy to get our OS going on it (especially when I couldn't talk to the serial-on-lan port for a stupid reason, and could not get into the box.. I could at least use the debugger to verify we were booting).

Wow, I had no idea! OpenBMC support even? That sounds like a decent platform to hack on...

I got curious about the BF3 because of the 256-thread RISC-V data path.

The downside is its so expensive it might as well be made out of solid gold...

Yeah, you lost me at "nvidia" lol.

The M.2 is PCIe. 4 lanes of Gen 3. You can get an adapter if you want the traditional form factor.

But then you give up the storage :/

The M.2 NVMe only has 2 lanes of Gen 3 on this board, the other 2 are given to the SATA controller

It's not fast, but at least it's cool.

One of the big selling ports of ARM is lower power consumption so I'd have loved to see some numbers, particularly idle watts.

Also, I can find full photos of the board elsewhere but full front and back pics of it would have been nice to include.

But what does it cost and where can you buy them

4GB LPDDR5: $99 8GB LPDDR5: $119 16GB LPDDR5: $159 32GB LPDDR5: $239

Actual vendors aren't known yet but I imagine allnetchina, arace, and OKdo for the EU/UK market will be supplying them

is the board still low profile for mini-itx case? the 2USB+HDMI seems a little higher than I remembered.

ATX and mini-ITX should use the same size IO shield.

not really, mini-itx has a low-profile form, which means, really thin

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