- Has a fan
- Costs 100-150 $
Would be nice to have one though.
+10 points for the RTC. Now we’re just missing an EFI and then ARM SBCs will be decent things.
That would be a nice addition, but honestly I haven’t missed having it. I can still choose where to boot from, adjust clock settings, and other low level operations on most SBCs.
There’s something that you may have not considered…
The ARM ecosystem is a fucking mess of companies who don’t want to implement a generic UEFI thus you’ll never get generic day one support from OSes like there is on x86. Every single new ARM board requires has to fork the kernel and implement device specific stuff into it, this is a waste of time and doesn’t scale very well… In x86 the UEFI is made by brands such as AMI, Phoenix and Insyde that essentially provide a generic hardware abstraction layer in a more or less consistent way to all hardware manufacturers and kernels.
If we manage to get ARM vendors to implement a UEFI then any Linux kernel would boot without any extra tweaks as long as the CPU is already supported.
This is not about what we can or can’t do with well tested SBCs, this is about making sure new boards work out of the box without extra work, long term support is easier and we also get mainline support for the majority of Linux distros instead of just a few.
