The Luckfox Pico Mini B – Linux in a Thumbnail | Hacker News Reader

The Luckfox Pico Mini B – Linux in a Thumbnail

taoofmac.com

63 pointsrcarmo12 comments

Yes, it's nice. Good for making Linux based USB devices (based on gadget subsystem).

It can run Arch Linux ARM if you enable swap on uSD card, and don't overdo it with your RSS. Systemd doesn't really support 64MiB RAM out of the box, though. It runs, but systemctl daemon-reload fails, eg.

You can ignore systemd boot flow and run Arch Linux using busybox or other init process, so you get all the Arch software/pacman + low memory use of cheaper PID 0 process and startup scripts. :)

The board runs best with pure statically compiled busybox running from initramfs. Boot times of the kernel are like 150ms because there's not really that much HW in the SoC or on the board to initialize. So you can plug the board into PC and you get USB device ready in ~2s.

Fun tiny thing to eg. hide your secret material from your PC.

I wrote a simple 8 KiB bootloader for RV1103/6 so that I don't have to mess with porting U-Boot to this, and made it run with Linux 6.10/11.

That's nice to know. I didn't have nearly as much time to play with it as I originally planned, and the post is essentially my notes from a month ago, with a few odds and ends trimmed.

Do you have that bootloader published someplace? I'd like to get a more recent kernel going...

I have a kernel here https://megous.com/git/linux/log/?h=luckfox-6.10

Bootloader will be at https://xnux.eu/log/ when I get to releasing it.

I think the Luckfox Pico series is the lowest cost ARM-based board you can buy (that runs Linux) at the moment. Even the Pi Zero is $10. Prior to this, it was a board based on the Allwinner F1C100, but I don't think anyone made and sold a dev board except for a DIY business card [0].

[0] https://www.thirtythreeforty.net/posts/2019/12/my-business-c...

$10 Linux sidecar to 10X utility of $1000 Apple M4 iPad Pro, e.g. bypass censorship of trusted JIT code.

Radxa Zero, https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2023/10/07/1830

Pi Zero 2W, https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2023/09/09/1820

> iPad as a smart terminal and the Pi as a tiny portable server, and the combination is what makes it work for me.. I can code, run all kinds of services and do all sorts of development-related tasks that I (still) can’t do on the iPad by itself..

The Zero is _easily_ the best bang for the buck of all the SBCs I’ve used over the past few years. I use it daily from my iPad (actually just installed BasiliskII on it to open and possibly convert some old Mac files).

Could be really interesting to port Alpine Linux to those and other similar boards. It is a lot smaller than libc based distros and has been already ported to the Raspberry Pi and other ARM systems, but although they have RPi images readily downloadable on their site, there's no such thing for other boards, and the process to take their ARM ecosystem and turn it into a bootable image that can be transferred onto a SD card is quite long.

Pretty amazing that this has a video encoder in the chip:

https://www.rock-chips.com/uploads/pdf/2022.8.26/192/RK3588%...

Much more amazing if there is any workable software to utilise it.

There is a set of tools and libraries for that listed in their wiki. I gather it works pretty well, just didn’t have the time to get around to it…

That's a pretty cool little board. It looks like they have versions with 10/100 Ethernet for not a lot more as well.

Yes, and those have more I/O pins exposed.

Also pretty useless with mainline because it's not straightforward to get embedded ethernet phy working, even after doing pretty much what BSP code does to power it up. Access to it times out.

(That is if you want to run some code that's anywhere close to mainline Linux on this board, and not some non-maintained BSP fork.)

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