[Arm-netbook] EOMA68 switch / NAS

[luke.leighton]

On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 6:30 PM, joem <joem at martindale-electric.co.uk> wrote:

> The  $55 Phytec Cosmic Boards Feature Freescale Vybrid SoCs are out:
> It uses Cortex A5
> http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=VF6xx
> According to datasheet it has Dual 10/100 Ethernet with L2 Switch (IEEE 1588)
> Would 2 ports be enough?

 for the project i'm looking at yes.  but they'd be competing a $1 or
$2 realtek 200mhz MIPS with 6 ethernet ports against a $12 500mhz ARM
with 2 ethernet ports... hmmm, no real comparison there.

 but i really feel that the RTL8366 is a better fit, anyway - it's a
plain gigabit switch.  it'd be nicer to find a gigabit switch with 5
or 6 built-in PHYs rather than needing the RTL8121s to do the
conversion but it's still good

 the reason it's a better fit is because of the difficulty managing 2
processors.  what i found with the existing solution which is a
PC-Engines Alix6f2 is that compared to say a Mikrotik RouterBoard or a
DreamPlug, installation on the Alix6f2 is a piece of piss.  i mean...
it's an AMD Geode LX, it's an x86 processor, you download a debian 486
kernel "debian installer" netboot image, PXE boot the damn thing and
you're done installing in 30 minutes.

with the Mikrotiks i tried really hard to work out the install
process: gave up.  the DreamPlug you have to this desperate dance with
a JTAG reader, pressing a key within 1/10th of a second over the RS232
of powering it on, and that's just to get it into firmware-flash mode:
you have to cross-compile u-boot and the kernel first....

to be absolutely honest i can't be bothered to go through that again
(which is what would be needed with the RTL8366 or the VF6xx).  i
don't mind doing it for a product where there's going to be a large
community behind it (EOMA68 CPU Cards), and that's the difference,
really, right there.

l.