Is there an ARM (or RISC-V) SBC under 200 euros where Guix system either works out of the box or costs little effort to set up?

Guix
1

Or which SBC is easiest to run Guix system on?

[edit]

I changed the title a bit after Howardpan’s reply, since I consider RISC-V > ARM64 > X86-64 due to license types.
So Orange Pi 6 it should be,
except that I’m not gonna spend more than 200 euros on an SBC.

2

I would think the Radxa X4 or any x86 based SBC would work out of the box. Otherwise, I would guess an SBC with UEFI (Orange Pi 6).

3

Which ARM SBC under 200 euros would then take the least amount of work?
Orange Pi 5+?

Everything on this platinum list?

Is it a good idea to go for UEFI?
Would it not be a better idea to go U-boot? linuxboot/u-root?

4

If you go with UEFI, wouldn’t you be able to boot directly with the installer downloaded from the guix.gnu.org web site?

5

I’m not sure what you’re talking about, but my idea now is that I buy an Orange Pi 5+, install Raspberry Pi OS on it, then install EDK2 UEFI firmware on it, so I can run the Guix aarch64 iso.

6

We are saying the same thing. I just wasn’t sure one can install UEFI on to OPI5. That’s all. You might also want to take compilation time into consideration. Best of luck.

7

Is there a guide for this or are you writing about your approach and progress somewhere? I’d be very interested in the process and the results.

8

Ah, well so far I just ordered the thing via aliexpress and came to the conclusion that I bought the wrong case for it. Orange Pi 5 and Orange Pi 5 Pro are not the same cards, so the case did not fit.
So I’m waiting for a new case and a heatsink, before I even begin with replacing the firmware.
I also discovered that the Orange Pi 5 Pro has a slot for NVMe SSD, but these are too expensive for me at the moment.

9

This is a fork where someone’s trying to get a mnt-reform working which has the same chipset base (rk3588)

They’re trying to run the proprietary software on it which is a pain the put back in.

I’ve been looking at doing this. I have an orangepi 5+, but I’m stuck on the bootloader. I’d really like to get a PXE boot workflow going but still working on my VyOS router (kinda not though)

How different would this be with UEFI? Why is it so much simpler? It’s never really clear to me what the differences are between boards.

This NixOS user has put a lot of effort into similar boards: matthewcroughan/matthew-hardware

10

Well I did something unbelievably stupid.
I did not check what models Orange Pi has
and thus confused 5 Plus with 5 Pro.

11

Yeh they’re different. OrangePi 5+ > 5-Pro > 5

Which one did you get?

12

I got the 5-Pro. With all the USB-ports it looked great to me.

13

I can’t remember what the exact differences are. The Orange pi 5+ I got has:

  • 2 Ethernet, 2 HDMI out, one HDMI in
  • 16 GB RAM, eMMC, NVMe
  • SOC with CPU, integrated GPU and some NPU I doubt I’ll be able to use

The NPU requires rebuilding stuff with ONNX to map ML to the supported NPU API for rockchip’s rknn.

They get hot though, so you need to jump through some extra hoops to cool the CPU if your driving it hard

14

I bought a heatsink for it.
I’m gonna use it as a server node.

Could it be that I could use the SD-card as some kind of bootloader for the NVMe SSD card, which I don’t have, but could buy.

15

it can be configured to boot from SD, eMMC or NVMe – i think using either UEFI and u-boot. it ships with u-boot.

you have to go through installing the basic OrangePi ubuntu build first. or armbian. that gives you some CLI tools. it’s better to keep it the way it is until you’ve used it a bit. You can boot from SD, but it’s slow.

writing the image to SPI flash can go badly & brick the device. I think you can restore using MaskROM mode, but the app is in chinese

16

So far the development is reordering…

  • Power Supply 5V 4A Type-C → Power Supply 5V 5A Type-C
  • SATA-600 M.2 SSD → NVMe M.2 SSD

I have done everything wrong so far I think.

I also get the feeling that the Orange Pi ranks their numbers on raw power,
instead of modernity, similar to what Loongson has done with their CPUs.

17

An update. I’ve got the NVMe M.2 SSD.
I have yet to figure out how to get Armbian to boot Guix.

18

[Update]

I figured out how to get Armbian to boot Armbian on the NVMe, but that was just through running the armbian-install.

I asked on the forum if I could use Armbian to boot Guix, but they said it was impossible?
I figured that I probably need to ‘dd’ the guix system install a USB drive rather than the NVMe directly.

So here’s the setup I’m thinking of:

  • SD card with pure U-boot installed on it. (no more Armbian)
  • USB device with ‘guix system install aarch64’ installed on it.
  • NVMe device where the guix system will be installed to.

So the pure U-boot would have to boot the USB device first and the NVMe device… somehow.
I’ll install pure U-boot images and see what it does.