Cubox? Linux 3.7 released, bringing generic ARM support

[Thomas Milne]

On 2012-12-16 9:31 PM, "Lennart Sorensen" <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org>
wrote:
>
> 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 got an eSATA cable for Christmas, Tiger Direct apparently gave away a
nice 7 foot cable for $8. Sweet! At least now it has decent storage for my
bittorrent lawlessness. ESATA won't hotplug due to kernel power saving
moves by Cubox devs, you have to reboot, but otherwise sweetness.

It is actually a pretty good computer in general. The problem comes with
web browsing when you get beyond a couple of tabs open in Firefox and all
the scripts start to pile up in the background. I guess that's a
combination of memory and lack of hard FP? I am not an expert... :-)

> 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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