raspberry pi 4

[Greg V]

On July 10, 2019 3:52:43 AM GMT+03:00, Denis Polygalov <dpolyg at gmail.com> wrote:
>ROCK64 was released a year ago and it is better than RPi 4 now.

Definitely not better in terms of processing power. RPi 4 has quad Cortex-A72 cores! A72!!

Also, RPi 4 no longer uses a custom broadcom interrupt controller, it has a GICv2, so it's definitely less stupid than the older ones.

And it's probably the only SoC with an *official* open source GPU driver. Not that the reverse engineered ones are bad, but this is pretty cool. Apparently Mesa V3D is the *only* driver, and no one would ever get a blob.

>ROCKPro64 even more better and have PCIExpress slot - unique
>and most desirable feature on ARM boards.

Unfortunately, it has a craptastic Synopsys Designware PCIe host controller. And from what I understand, the worst version of it – no ECAM mode (probably?), tiny BAR size, no chance of running a GPU. Well, that's what people say on the internet at least.

(For some context, the Marvell MACCHIATObin (Armada 8040) also has a Designware controller, but it actually supports ECAM. It does have a hilarious bug – some devices (in my experience, only ones recognized as "legacy" by edk2) are multiplied, i.e. one device appears in all slots, because the hardware does not filter packets properly. Still, it works, and I have a GPU running on FreeBSD!)

>I just bought one of them while ago and tried to
>boot FreeBSD on it without success

Well, these days it should work – CPU clock control, sdcard and Ethernet at least. I have a patch on phabricator that enables USB3 on the ROCKPro64 (RK3399) – might help ROCK64 too, haven't tested though.