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posted by mrpg on Tuesday July 03 2018, @12:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the nobody-think-of-the-NUC dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

[...] While it has been possible to get Alpine on the Pi for some time – Raspberry Pi 2 owners have been able to get it working since version 3.2.0 – this is the first version to add support for the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ and also offer an arm64 (aarch64) image to ease deployment.

The Pi 3 Model B+ packs a surprising amount of power into a small package, rocking a 64 bit 1.4GHz processor and gigabit ethernet (over USB 2.0). The 1GB RAM (unchanged from the previous Model B) should give the slimline Alpine incarnation of Linux more than enough headroom, depending what else you decide to run.

[...] Alpine's frugal nature makes it appealing as an alternative to some of the more resource intensive distributions available for the Pi, with optimisations such as OpenRC replacing systemd as the init system. A minimal disk installation will only consume around 130MB and the maintainers claim a container only needs 8MB.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday July 03 2018, @12:58PM (25 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday July 03 2018, @12:58PM (#701868) Homepage
    I'm happy with Raspian on my old RasPi B+:

    phil@razspaz:~$ uname -a
    Linux razspaz 4.10.17+ #1 Tue May 23 10:24:51 CEST 2017 armv6l GNU/Linux

    phil@razspaz:~$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list
    deb http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged jessie main
    ...

    However, that's very underpowered, so I'll be migrating to a RasPi 3 when one comes into the local shops, and will definitely be in the market for a frugal and systemd-free distro.
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
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  • (Score: 5, Touché) by FatPhil on Tuesday July 03 2018, @12:59PM (4 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday July 03 2018, @12:59PM (#701869) Homepage
    Ug. I was *unhappy* with Raspian... (and am super happy with Devuan)
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday July 03 2018, @01:18PM (3 children)

      by LoRdTAW (3755) on Tuesday July 03 2018, @01:18PM (#701881) Journal

      Dump that poettering junk. There was one point where I had a bunch of trouble fighting with avahi which was sucking up 100% CPU. It's a useless piece of shit so I turned it off. Then systemderp gave us trouble creating a service for running a daemon. damn Lindows.

      • (Score: 4, Interesting) by urza9814 on Tuesday July 03 2018, @01:38PM (2 children)

        by urza9814 (3954) on Tuesday July 03 2018, @01:38PM (#701888) Journal

        I've been playing with Void Linux lately, and might end up switching my laptop over to that soon. Haven't tried it on a Pi yet, but they do support it (at least the Pi 1/2...doesn't mention the 3):

        https://voidlinux.org/download/ [voidlinux.org]

        • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday July 03 2018, @09:28PM

          by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Tuesday July 03 2018, @09:28PM (#702190) Journal

          Another Void user here :) Artix Linux is nice too and comes default with Runit now, though I've noticed it seems a liiiittle buggy compared to Void.

          --
          I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
        • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday July 03 2018, @10:57PM

          by LoRdTAW (3755) on Tuesday July 03 2018, @10:57PM (#702221) Journal

          Thanks for that void reminder. Hmmmm... rolling, optional musl libc, bsd licensing of their tools, no systemd;runit looks very interesting, and libressl. I'm liking what I see.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @01:07PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @01:07PM (#701874)

    armv6l

    Your arm is so limp, your floating point isn't even hard.

    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday July 03 2018, @03:01PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 03 2018, @03:01PM (#701929) Journal

      A device with a limp ARM needs a different kind of device to get its floating point hard.

      --
      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday July 03 2018, @03:29PM (2 children)

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday July 03 2018, @03:29PM (#701950) Homepage
      Is there a way of benchmarking how much of the time is wasted in FP-emulation? I don't do any "computation" on the device, so would hope it would be close to zero.
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 04 2018, @04:55AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 04 2018, @04:55AM (#702385)

        When armhf was still just a port (not official arch) in Debian, the published benchmarks for armhf vs. armel were around 15-30% faster. I was running it on an original Panda board back then, perf was adequate for such a low powered board, but I never benchmarked it.

        • (Score: 2) by bitstream on Wednesday July 04 2018, @09:03AM

          by bitstream (6144) on Wednesday July 04 2018, @09:03AM (#702460) Journal

          How fast ARM (say Cortex-M3) is needed to software encode 640x480 video? what fps will that provide?
          Or 320 x 240 ?
          (no audio)

          Minimum RAM?

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by coolgopher on Tuesday July 03 2018, @01:45PM (13 children)

    by coolgopher (1157) on Tuesday July 03 2018, @01:45PM (#701891)

    Speaking of choice, I've mostly switched across to the Rock64 [pine64.org] from the Pi these days. The Raspberry Pi Foundation's insistence on running a not-mainline kernel, together with the Poettering crapd introduction has left me cold. I've found the Rock64 a really good alternative, what with the increased RAM as well as a real ethernet port (i.e. not stuck on the USB 2.0 bus), and a genuine USB 3.0 port.

    I did have to disable the checksum offloading on the ethernet to avoid a stall that would happen when operating in gigabit mode. I haven't had time to sit down and try newer kernels in many months, but hopefully it's been fixed by now.

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 03 2018, @01:49PM (3 children)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday July 03 2018, @01:49PM (#701892) Journal
      • (Score: 2) by coolgopher on Tuesday July 03 2018, @02:42PM

        by coolgopher (1157) on Tuesday July 03 2018, @02:42PM (#701912)

        At $100 it feels a bit too pricey for me, though it looks like a decent board overall. The plain Renegade board looks very similar to the Rock64, at pretty much the same price point. I haven't tried either of them, but I was reasonably happy with Rockchip's available documentation when I had to look into the boot process details.

      • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday July 04 2018, @12:03AM (1 child)

        by jmorris (4844) on Wednesday July 04 2018, @12:03AM (#702256)

        Why? If you are doing embedded things a Pi is probably good enough. But if you want more, like to actually run a browser and need more than 1GB of ram, etc. you run smack into the problem that everything that isn't a Pi is basically headless. They keep churning out all manner of little single board Arm systems with dumb framebuffer video and perhaps a buggy blob tied to one non-mainline kernel that provides accelerated video decode. Until the video driver logjam is cleared away none of these things are useful. The Pi is too underpowered and lacking in essentials and everything else is headless. What is needed is to smack the Pi people upside the head and get them to build one with 2 or 4GB ram, and PCIe with a real Ethernet port on that.

        • (Score: 2) by bitstream on Wednesday July 04 2018, @09:11AM

          by bitstream (6144) on Wednesday July 04 2018, @09:11AM (#702462) Journal

          2 or 4GB ram, and PCIe with a real Ethernet port on that.

          That's a desktop machine. Not embedded gadget. Get one of those mini-PCs or used laptop. Better suited for the task.

          (though.. Pi really could get-a-real-Ethernet-port-thanks(tm) )

    • (Score: 2) by richtopia on Tuesday July 03 2018, @02:47PM

      by richtopia (3160) on Tuesday July 03 2018, @02:47PM (#701915) Homepage Journal

      SBCs are a bit of a hobby of mine. I haven't used the Rock64 before but really like the specs on it.

      I personally run ODROIDs myself, as they seem to have one of the largest communities (probably the second largest, although the Pine64 community is also alive as you probably know).

      From my testing, the two most important things I've identified are driver support and community. Bashing your head against a wall on some poorly documented piece of hardware is not worth saving 30 dollars. And when it comes to SBCs, speed typically isn't an issue. None of them are fast, but the jobs asked of them match the hardware.

      To be honest, my webserver has moved back to x86 on my circa 2010 laptop. I migrated to Docker, and while they support ARM and ARM64 most containers are build only for AMD64. Between that and the ability to upgrade the processor and memory from ebay purchases really made the laptop the better choice.

    • (Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Tuesday July 03 2018, @02:57PM (2 children)

      by TheGratefulNet (659) on Tuesday July 03 2018, @02:57PM (#701924)

      odroid xu4

      real usb3, 8 cores, can be a traffic generator for gig-ethernet (2 full ports at very close to wire speed).

      pi's suck and continue to suck. the good thing about the pi is the community; without that, the pi would be just another half-ass sbc.

      --
      "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
      • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday July 03 2018, @04:02PM (1 child)

        by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday July 03 2018, @04:02PM (#701973) Homepage
        Yeah, the RasPi is the "cheap" option by every definition of the term. But it works as a low-throughput web- and mail server, and ssh/tmux/irc hub for a bunch of mates.

        root@razspaz:/var/log# uptime
          19:00:57 up 181 days, 6:43, 7 users, load average: 0.94, 0.53, 0.42
        --
        Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
        • (Score: 2) by Snotnose on Tuesday July 03 2018, @04:39PM

          by Snotnose (1623) on Tuesday July 03 2018, @04:39PM (#701997)

          Yeah, the RasPi is the "cheap" option by every definition of the term. But it works as a low-throughput web- and mail server, and ssh/tmux/irc hub for a bunch of mates.

          root@razspaz:/var/log# uptime
              19:00:57 up 181 days, 6:43, 7 users, load average: 0.94, 0.53, 0.42

          You'll be glad to know there's a new version of software out, released last weekend. So much for your uptime :)

          --
          Why shouldn't we judge a book by it's cover? It's got the author, title, and a summary of what the book's about.
    • (Score: 2) by bitstream on Tuesday July 03 2018, @06:05PM (4 children)

      by bitstream (6144) on Tuesday July 03 2018, @06:05PM (#702078) Journal

      Rock64 1 GByte [pine64.org] for 25 USD seem interesting!

      Though the proprietary "MALI-450 MP2 GPU" might be a problem.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @08:41PM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @08:41PM (#702157)

        I'm getting a 403 Forbidden. Is it down, or does it not like my Frankenbrowser?

        • (Score: 2) by bitstream on Wednesday July 04 2018, @12:03AM (2 children)

          by bitstream (6144) on Wednesday July 04 2018, @12:03AM (#702255) Journal

          Maybe your browser https-fu is too weak. But I did a archiving of the page at archive.org:
          Archived version.. [archive.org]

          Hope it helps.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 04 2018, @12:14AM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 04 2018, @12:14AM (#702259)

            Excellent, works, thanks.

  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 03 2018, @06:14PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday July 03 2018, @06:14PM (#702082)

    Full disclosure: I've always found Raspbian to be sufficient to my needs on all manner of RPi.

    Within Raspbian, there once was an option to go either without or with systemd, the transition was pretty invisible from my use perspective, except: the systemd version booted faster, like half the time. Seemed like a good trade to me.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]