Cubox? Linux 3.7 released, bringing generic ARM support

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 11:54:21AM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> If I remember correctly, Lennart is a local expert on the Cubox.

Well I have one now, but haven't had time to do much with it yet.
i have worked a lot with arm in general though.

> There is no "Ubuntu 10".  There is 10.04 LTS and 10.10, but those are
> distinct.
> 
> What is it slow doing?  Why?
>
> As far as I know, the major thing that *might* get sped up in another
> distro is floating point.  Most programs don't care about FP
> performance, but a few care a lot -- do you run any of those?

Like perl.

> My perception is that these little devices are sometimes slow because:
> 
> - the memory interface is narrower than a PC's so memory bandwidth is
>   bad
> 
> - 1 ARM MIP < 1 x86 MIP for modern x86 implementations

Depends on the generation of arm.  The Cortex A8 yes, the A9 probably
not.

> - most I/O is funneled through USB 2.x (example: ethernet on
>   RaspberryPI) (example: all disk I/O)

That's just stupid design.  That makes things very slow.

> - I think that SD cards (except perhaps the fastest) are slower than
>   hard drives even if USB isn't the bottleneck

SD cards are often slow and the interfaces tend to be cpu intensive.
On my imx53 I use SATA rather than the microSD which makes it much faster.

> - video drivers are crap since there are no high-performance open source
>   video drivers for any ARM display subsystem yet

Unfortunately true so far.

> - not enough RAM (new desktops start at 4G; most ARM systems stop at
>   1G)

A few seem to have 2GB now.  Next year should see some systems with a lot
more now that server chips based on the Cortex A15 are becoming available.

> Who knows.  It is a future direction so it may not be embraced by old
> products.  Too many embedded systems are "fire and forget" by their
> producers.  I don't have any knowledge of the Cubox folks intention.
> You could ask them.
> 
> Surely we can help there.
> 
> Where are you?  What does it involve/require (time, equipment, 
> expertise, risks)?

-- 
Len Sorensen
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