I don't know about low power (or inexpensive, for that matter), but the HiFive Unmatched has lots of IO. 8 lanes of PCIe 3.0 can be expanded into quite a few SATA 3 ports.
For ARM, rk3568 is available now and has 2 lanes of PCIe 3.0 and up to 3 SATA-3 ports. As opposed to the rpi4 which has a single PCIe 2.1 lane.
NanoPI M4 burned two SD cards and destroyed its own eMMC module due to some weird behavior while I was using it for NAS.
No idea what caused it, I suspect excessive writes and wearing the flash storage or corrupting the bootloader and not being able to recognize the boot media. The "wear" I mentioned could be something else of course, but except the normal OS writes, everything went to the SATA drives.
It sounded like a solid piece of hardware with the 4 SATA-ports-hat and good CPU, but at the end it turned out to be un-reliable as at some point the OS hang, couldn't boot from the OS storage and the bootloader wasn't seeing the partitions via UART debug session.
Huh. The only thing I can think of off the top of my head that would cause it to chew up 2 SD cards is excessive amounts of logging. Nothing else really seems to make much sense.
Yeah I would love not being dependent on x86 and its horrid UEFI mess. Then again... I believe technically ARM (and even RISC-V) board manufacturers can also make something similar. Let's hope that doesn't become a thing though.
Why not? I've been working from the view that UEFI is the one of the few things worth keeping from x86_64 - I do not want to deal with every board having its own special boot process that prevents one disk being able to boot different machines. And UEFI is already here and works, so why reinvent the wheel?
The application profiles (like RVA22) have a bunch of requirements on hardware that must be present, the boot process and interface the firmware offers to the OS (i.e. opensbi).
Ok but does any of that work in practice? Can I write a random distro ISO to an SD card and expect it to work on any RISC-V board that has the same pointer size? Cause that’s how it works in PC land thanks to ACPI tables.
I just checked the Ubuntu RISC-V download page and it has 2 different ISOs for 2 boards from the same vendor! And apparently those are the only 2 boards with ISOs available 0_o
Now there’s a hot take! In PC land the same bootloader, kernel, config files, etc will work in pretty much computer. Hot swappable components are the norm here.
Meanwhile in ARM/RISC-V embedded land, every chip and every board is its own special snowflake. With no ACPI/UEFI, someone’s gotta hardcode the config of every device on every board, including the ones inside the SoC. Naturally the communities around these boards are even more fragmented than Linux distros already are.
