Fedora on Pine64 ROCKPro64

 May 29, 2023

Recently, I was looking for a couple of Single Board Computers (SBCs) for a project I’m working on. Given the characteristics I was looking for, there were not many options; in the end, I opted for the ROCKPro64 by Pine64.

Once I received the SBC, I immediately tried to put Fedora on it. The process proved slightly more complex than I was expecting since I assumed that U-Boot (or some other boot loader) was already present on the board. Turns out, it is not! So, the first step became installing U-Boot. An aspect I really like about the ROCKPro64 is that it has 128Mb of Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) Flash memory. I appreciate this fact because it allows me to install U-Boot there and then a standard OS on another storage device. Speaking of other storage devices, the ROCKPro64 features both an optional eMMC and the mSD Card slot. The process turned out more complex than I initially thought since my goal was to use Fedora on the eMMC, but I forgot to get the eMMC USB adapter, so I had to leverage the mSD Card as well.

ARM everywhere

 June 25, 2020

In the last couple of months, we have seen a lot of news around ARM. More specifically, the most relevant ones, in my opinion, are (sorted by date):

• On May 11, AWS announced the availability of new instance types (M6g, C6g, R6g) based on Graviton2, a new version of their in-house developed ARM processor
• On June 17, Ampere announced a 128 core ARM processor that will be added to their current line (that includes 32, 48, 64, 72, 80 cores ARM CPUs)
• On June 22, was made public that Fugaku, an ARM-based supercomputer, is the most potent publicly disclosed supercomputer
• On June 22, Apple announced that Macs will move to ARM Those pieces of news demonstrate how much the processors’ landscape is changing, and how fast the rate of change is.

The topic I would like to focus on is why, today, the x86 platform is not that appealing as it was in the ’90s when it became the de-facto standard. I think that there are two primary causes for this change of direction: