Can anyone explain me the economics of why a novelty hardware supplier would Not invest in drivers / software in parallel? There must be a good reason for this to happen, it even happens at the other end of the scale, but I would think the very basis (just any drivers, not even good ones) are an affordable investment? What use is your product if every review will say “good product, alas Windows and Linux won’t run”?
A reason I can imagine that drivers are (I don’t know!) somewhat interchangeable, so invest in drivers for your product and you are stimulating all current and future competitors as well.
wmf · 2m ago
Drivers are extremely expensive to develop (like 10x more than the hardware) and mostly interchangeable so every company is trying to free-ride on someone else to develop the drivers.
jauntywundrkind · 42m ago
ARM has such a mess. They don't actually make chips. And they don't make a sizable % of the design that goes into chips. There's all kinds of other IP, from power management to USB controllers, all manners of things they don't do.
So then the task falls to the chip makers. Who each are trying to figure out what to do themselves.
These folks don't usually want to do that or have the chops. There's usually one or many different folks taking off the shelf open source and porting it to this particular platform. These folks have a strong strong anti-incentive to do the right thing to upstream support: no one's gonna keep buying sdk's from these software vendors if they upstream support. And it is a pain to upstream support, to spend possibly years figuring out the long term way to do something.
(Notably some good players who focus on mainlining have emerged: Bootlin, Collabora.)
It's all so terrible. Theres some attempts to mature the platform, to make some standards so at least folks can boot something maybe (SystemReady and an array of neighboring acronyms). But man, it's so bad, your question is so searing, so obvious. This whole world systematically seems unable to do the right obvious good thing for itself, has resolutely remained a shitty backwater for 3+ decades versus x86.
ChocolateGod · 6m ago
[delayed]
jrmg · 4h ago
With the dearth of drivers as described, how do the manufacturers even know that all the hardware works? That there are no flaws in how it’s all wired together? How do they test everything?
Palomides · 4h ago
the chip manufacturer usually craps out a hacked up android build
dijit · 3h ago
ok, but, naively... Android is Linux with a userland- so the drivers must exist in some form.
kanwisher · 3h ago
Android has some ability to have binary drivers that aren't easily reusable for normal linux branches
notpushkin · 3h ago
Yup. There’s libhybris/Halium which wraps Android drivers for glibc-based Linux distros, but I think it’s more of a hack / stopgap solution.
arghwhat · 3h ago
From the perspective of drivers Radxa is not the hardware manufacturer. They combine off the shelf hardware according to its documentation to create a product.
Sometimes the original suppliers will have drivers, sometimes they just ship documentation and let it be up to the customers to write it, sometimes someone else contributed upstream support. When you get "drivers" from e.g. Lenovo, they didn't write them - they're just sending what they got along.
Nothing would work if there weren't drivers in general, the issue is that hardware can be configured in multiple ways and it's not all going to have have proper support or be well tested. In Linux land, this stuff sorts itself out as people get their hands on the hardware, pretty similar to how e.g. laptop support comes to be.
rjsw · 3h ago
ARM themself have an open rec right now for someone to work on GPU drivers, the one in this SoC isn't supported by panthor.
ZiiS · 4h ago
To a certain extent if your reviewers can just turn it on they spend their time benchmarking.
geerlingguy · 1h ago
Some of us try out every possible interface... but it turns into quite a slog, as usually only about half the advertised features work by the time the board ships to the public. Things like GPIO, display interfaces, NPUs, etc usually require a lot of tweaks if they work at all.
The O6 was better in that regard than many boards, but the bar is not very high.
My guess is that they wanted the board to be available to devs early to get feedback. I might buy this board in a few months, when it will likely work out of the mainline kernel.
mschuster91 · 5h ago
> Can anyone explain me the economics of why a novelty hardware supplier would Not invest in drivers / software in parallel?
There is no single company from Asia that deals in mass produced consumer goods that's capable of doing decent hardware and decent software at the same time. As soon as you take a peek below the surface, no matter what, it begins to reek.
Let's just go through the stuff I personally own or have experience in peeking... Samsung does decent hardware, but their modifications to Android, or their "hacks" for powersaving that keep messing up apps, or their "smart" TVs that are buggy and slow as fuck (not to mention riddled with ads!)... Sony makes excellent cameras hardware-wise but the software/firmware side sucks ass - the fact that they require a dedicated software to be used as a webcam instead of just exposing UVC is already braindead enough, but even more so given that they run on Linux and the Linux kernel already ships with UVC gadgets. Nintendo makes excellent games but even the new Switch 2 ships with a chipset that's years old. Mediatek's leaks for BSPs / Android are frightening in terms of code quality.
Unfortunately, the competition just isn't there. Chinese companies are even worse penny-pinchers than Korean or Taiwanese, and Western companies outside of Apple and Raspberry Pi just don't give a shit because they can't compete with Asian price dumpers or because, like many things in the ham radio scene, get cloned in a matter of months.
mbreese · 3h ago
I don’t think there is a need to limit this geographically. As a rule hardware companies are bad at software. It doesn’t really matter where they are from. If you’re including things like TVs that spy on you, don’t forget Visio. They are one of the poster children for making TVs with content tracking and/were they are based in California.
The exceptions I see include Apple and Raspberry Pi. And even then, there are missteps.
It’s not intentional… it’s just that companies rarely have integration as one of their core strengths. If you’re a hardware company, you are good at making hardware. The skills necessary for that are very different than the skills needed for software. To get both, you need management that values both and can build the separate teams. Especially true when you can argue that you’re working with the “community” to build out software and fix bugs. If you’re still selling enough hardware, how can you say these companies are wrong?
That’s honestly a hard thing to do unless that is your competitive advantage. And for Apple and Raspberry Pi, I’d argue that is their competitive advantage in their markets. For a long time they were the small fish in big ponds. So they needed to have some trait that allowed them to command higher margins. Integration of hardware and software was it.
bgnn · 2h ago
This is slightly racist and totally wrong on many many points. Are American hardware companies better at software? Dell? HP? Vizio? Intel? AMD? Or European companies: Philips, Siemens? It's all the same. Even Apple has the abomination of iOS on their great HW..
mschuster91 · 1h ago
> Are American hardware companies better at software? Dell? HP? Vizio? Intel? AMD?
Depends. If you're looking for consumer goods, they're just as dogshit as everyone else. Products intended for large commercial customers, particularly where support contracts are involved, tend to be actually decent.
> Or European companies: Philips, Siemens?
Never had an issue with Hue, never had an issue with Bosch-Siemens "white goods".
> Even Apple has the abomination of iOS on their great HW..
iOS certainly is not an abomination. I'm using both Android and iOS, and the latter is much more polished.
betterThanTexas · 4h ago
> There is no single company from Asia that deals in mass produced consumer goods that's capable of doing decent hardware and decent software at the same time.
Doesn't apple do most of their manufacturing in asia? I don't get your point. We certainly can't match this quality in the west.
mschuster91 · 4h ago
> Doesn't apple do most of their manufacturing in asia?
Yes, but on the back of every MacBook there is the line "Designed by Apple in California" and the software is made in California as well.
Asia is just chosen for manufacturing because of the close proximity of supply chain vendors and cheap but reliable labor cost.
betterThanTexas · 3h ago
Well then Asia is de-facto doing the hardware. Apple is just paying for it.
Apple is famously sitting on a mountain of cash. How easily do you think they could replicate the supply chain of even one of their products without outsourcing it?
drob518 · 2h ago
Apple is designing the hardware in the USA, not Asia. Asia designs the manufacturing process, which they are quite good at.
mschuster91 · 1h ago
> Asia designs the manufacturing process, which they are quite good at.
Not even that, for some parts like the aluminium cases ("unibody") or the laser-bored microholes in their old magsafe connector for the LEDs, Apple designed the whole process.
wjnc · 4h ago
Any thoughts into the Why? Culture, finance, …? I get your point. Also thinking about Sony or Nintendo. Billions more to be made if only those firms where more technically-commercial (make accounts and buying stuff for parents Easy).
drob518 · 1h ago
IMO, it’s company culture and focus. At Apple, they are focused foremost on designing the customer experience. If you’ve ever unboxed one of their products, you can tell from the first moment that they care about even this part of the product life. It’s only 5 minutes and yet someone has clearly spent time on it. That carries through to the integration of hardware and software in the products. That doesn’t mean Apple is the best at either hardware or software. IMO, there are companies that do just as well or better at either of those things. But Apple does whole product design better than anyone. That is something that is very difficult to add to an organization that doesn’t understand it. IMO, it really started for Apple with Steve Jobs and being the founder, he was able to drive that into the culture. But it wasn’t there even for them at the start. IMO, it really got going when Steve returned the second time and drove products like iMac and iPod.
mschuster91 · 4h ago
Cutthroat capitalism is definitely part of the reasons, especially when looking at China and the low end of the market. When there are dozens if not hundreds of factories that have the skilled people to put up a hardware design either from scratch or as a clone of something already existing, "time to market" trumps everything - the earlier you can get the product on Alibaba, Temu or the alphabet-soup sellers on Amazon, the better. As soon as the hardware is ready and the software somewhat stable, out the door it goes - there is no responsibility, no accountability along the chain, so why invest in it?
For the "big ticket" brand items, honestly I don't know. If anything I wouldn't blame it on culture (partially because I lack enough knowledge of Asian cultures, partially because blaming systemic issue on culture can quickly devolve into outright racism), but on capitalist incentives once again - the common standard seems to be "as low in terms of quality as you can get away with", there is no market force pushing for better products, and no legal/regulatory pressure either.
markvdb · 53m ago
s/from Asia//
digisocialnet · 5h ago
What about DJI?
cgio · 4h ago
For one their app does not work on a recent pixel but does e.g. on an oppo…Id say GP argument is valid.
mschuster91 · 4h ago
Let's just say I'm pissed about the Mini 3 Pro's controller. Has an USB-C host and client port but isn't capable of actually using them for anything relevant, and the built-in wifi is rotten. Zero way of extending the drone's functionality by writing one's own apps/scripts - but the cheaper N1 that just uses a phone, there's hacks for it...
jasoneckert · 4h ago
> Prices for those in the US (like me) just tripled due to import tariffs (ordering the 32 GB model went from $400 to $1500).
This was the biggest takeaway for me in this post. In the past, to experiment with a particular piece of new hardware, we had to a) obtain the hardware, and b) obtain or create software for it. With a) fast becoming out-of-reach for most people, this puts a dampener on b).
doawoo · 2h ago
Reading this line made me so mad. I've been a huge fan of lower power ARM CPUs... this literally just halt/hampers progress in this country. I can't believe we have to put up with 4 full years of this crap.
I would have purchased this board in a heartbeat otherwise. Ugh.
cyanydeez · 1h ago
....atleast 4 years
danieldk · 3h ago
There are a lot of open source developers outside the US. While development will certainly take a hit, the world is larger than the US. For more niche boards, it may not even change things much - they are often hard to get due to limited supplies and now more boards will just end up in the hands of developers on other continents.
_whiteCaps_ · 2h ago
I'm not so sure about that. I think it's also possible that these niche boards won't get built if they aren't able to sell them in the US market.
buyucu · 2h ago
China has 1 billion more people than the US. These board would still get built, it's just that you won't be able to read the manuals because they will be in Chinese.
zettabomb · 5h ago
I bought one of these, with the full 64GB of RAM. So far it's been a fun machine to play with. In UEFI mode I can install Fedora 42 with essentially zero issues (it tells you that the bootloader didn't install but actually it did and works fine), which is quite smooth for ARM. It will be nice to see the CPU clusters, GPU/NPU drivers, and various PCIe snags worked out, but I really like what it has at this price point (assuming you're not in the US).
cenamus · 4h ago
I actually had the bootloader error message on my install too (regular intel amd64 CPU), so might be something else
irusensei · 4h ago
Does the CPU includes something like an fTPM? The documentation also suggests there is an unsoldered TPM included.
zettabomb · 3h ago
As far as I can tell, no. It's a separate footprint on the PCB, not difficult to add if you've done a bit of soldering. I haven't tried that yet.
buyucu · 3h ago
does Vulkan work? It's a must-have for llama.cpp.
aseipp · 2h ago
There is a fork of Mesa with some support for the onboard GPU (Immortals G720), but it's not upstream yet and might not be for a while. Some people on the forums have installed various discrete GPUs, which would obviously work (modulo bugs.)
Radxa has been notoriously bad at supporting their hardware from the software side.
Their hardware is great, but they launch a product and then won't offer a proper distribution for it, hoping that some developers will take care of this for them, for free.
This is why I love Raspberry Pi so much: they care about the software just as much as about the hardware, if not even more. And that is great. Because the hardware, once you have it, that's it, it won't change.
I don't know about Raspberry OS, but when I installed Raspbian 12 Bookworm on my first-gen Raspi with 500MB RAM, it worked. It's now working as a VPN server.
Jan 10, 2024: beta 6: Currently there is an issue preventing the Debian CLI image from booting, and we suggest users to use the Desktop variant instead for now. Ubuntu CLI: This flavor is provided as-is except for critical issues. Users should look at Debian CLI as an alternative.
There are now community maintained Armbian variants, but it took a long time for them to appear. There was also a distibution by some other volunteer, but Radxa did nothing.
zozbot234 · 1h ago
AIUI, even the Raspbian is only supported by a somewhat hacky downstream kernel to begin with. It takes time to achieve proper upstream support, and even then the community can only succeed due to how popular the Raspberry Pi hardware is.
als0 · 1h ago
It at least supports SystemReady. Presumably any OS that is SystemReady compatible will just work?
The SystemReady firmware is currently a bit limited. Not only does it still have high idle power consumption, it disables 4/12 cores.
irusensei · 3h ago
The whole tariff situation will probably dry out a significant amount from the incentives for such boards and it seems the only good options for a powerful ARM personal computer or home server are basically Macs or Ampere.
ksec · 2h ago
ARM China, and CIX, Cix CD8180 SoC, Armv9.2 Architecture.
I was under the impression that ARM China doesn't have the latest license to Armv9 and stops at Armv8. While ARM HQ opened a separate ARM Unit in Shanghai under a different name ARM Something ( Some Chinese Phonetics ). But CIX has had this SOC with Armv9 announced a while ago. So I assume ARM China is now officially back under ARM HQ / Softbank control?
By Control I dont mean just swapping a new CEO but the actual power structure of the company.
solarkraft · 1h ago
> once I installed the Nvidia proprietary driver with sudo ubuntu-drivers install nvidia:570, it was quite stable
Didn’t expect this to just be available for ARM. It really is making its way out of „weird niche platform“ territory to „it’s just a PC“! Especially together with the SystemReady firmware.
zabzonk · 5h ago
Is this so they can say they are "Orion Arm", which is where we are in the Milky Way galaxy?
drob518 · 2h ago
Clever
buyucu · 3h ago
This sounds like a cool board. Does anyone know if the APU works with llama.cpp?
A reason I can imagine that drivers are (I don’t know!) somewhat interchangeable, so invest in drivers for your product and you are stimulating all current and future competitors as well.
So then the task falls to the chip makers. Who each are trying to figure out what to do themselves.
These folks don't usually want to do that or have the chops. There's usually one or many different folks taking off the shelf open source and porting it to this particular platform. These folks have a strong strong anti-incentive to do the right thing to upstream support: no one's gonna keep buying sdk's from these software vendors if they upstream support. And it is a pain to upstream support, to spend possibly years figuring out the long term way to do something.
(Notably some good players who focus on mainlining have emerged: Bootlin, Collabora.)
It's all so terrible. Theres some attempts to mature the platform, to make some standards so at least folks can boot something maybe (SystemReady and an array of neighboring acronyms). But man, it's so bad, your question is so searing, so obvious. This whole world systematically seems unable to do the right obvious good thing for itself, has resolutely remained a shitty backwater for 3+ decades versus x86.
Sometimes the original suppliers will have drivers, sometimes they just ship documentation and let it be up to the customers to write it, sometimes someone else contributed upstream support. When you get "drivers" from e.g. Lenovo, they didn't write them - they're just sending what they got along.
Nothing would work if there weren't drivers in general, the issue is that hardware can be configured in multiple ways and it's not all going to have have proper support or be well tested. In Linux land, this stuff sorts itself out as people get their hands on the hardware, pretty similar to how e.g. laptop support comes to be.
The O6 was better in that regard than many boards, but the bar is not very high.
My guess is that they wanted the board to be available to devs early to get feedback. I might buy this board in a few months, when it will likely work out of the mainline kernel.
There is no single company from Asia that deals in mass produced consumer goods that's capable of doing decent hardware and decent software at the same time. As soon as you take a peek below the surface, no matter what, it begins to reek.
Let's just go through the stuff I personally own or have experience in peeking... Samsung does decent hardware, but their modifications to Android, or their "hacks" for powersaving that keep messing up apps, or their "smart" TVs that are buggy and slow as fuck (not to mention riddled with ads!)... Sony makes excellent cameras hardware-wise but the software/firmware side sucks ass - the fact that they require a dedicated software to be used as a webcam instead of just exposing UVC is already braindead enough, but even more so given that they run on Linux and the Linux kernel already ships with UVC gadgets. Nintendo makes excellent games but even the new Switch 2 ships with a chipset that's years old. Mediatek's leaks for BSPs / Android are frightening in terms of code quality.
Unfortunately, the competition just isn't there. Chinese companies are even worse penny-pinchers than Korean or Taiwanese, and Western companies outside of Apple and Raspberry Pi just don't give a shit because they can't compete with Asian price dumpers or because, like many things in the ham radio scene, get cloned in a matter of months.
The exceptions I see include Apple and Raspberry Pi. And even then, there are missteps.
It’s not intentional… it’s just that companies rarely have integration as one of their core strengths. If you’re a hardware company, you are good at making hardware. The skills necessary for that are very different than the skills needed for software. To get both, you need management that values both and can build the separate teams. Especially true when you can argue that you’re working with the “community” to build out software and fix bugs. If you’re still selling enough hardware, how can you say these companies are wrong?
That’s honestly a hard thing to do unless that is your competitive advantage. And for Apple and Raspberry Pi, I’d argue that is their competitive advantage in their markets. For a long time they were the small fish in big ponds. So they needed to have some trait that allowed them to command higher margins. Integration of hardware and software was it.
Depends. If you're looking for consumer goods, they're just as dogshit as everyone else. Products intended for large commercial customers, particularly where support contracts are involved, tend to be actually decent.
> Or European companies: Philips, Siemens?
Never had an issue with Hue, never had an issue with Bosch-Siemens "white goods".
> Even Apple has the abomination of iOS on their great HW..
iOS certainly is not an abomination. I'm using both Android and iOS, and the latter is much more polished.
Doesn't apple do most of their manufacturing in asia? I don't get your point. We certainly can't match this quality in the west.
Yes, but on the back of every MacBook there is the line "Designed by Apple in California" and the software is made in California as well.
Asia is just chosen for manufacturing because of the close proximity of supply chain vendors and cheap but reliable labor cost.
Apple is famously sitting on a mountain of cash. How easily do you think they could replicate the supply chain of even one of their products without outsourcing it?
Not even that, for some parts like the aluminium cases ("unibody") or the laser-bored microholes in their old magsafe connector for the LEDs, Apple designed the whole process.
For the "big ticket" brand items, honestly I don't know. If anything I wouldn't blame it on culture (partially because I lack enough knowledge of Asian cultures, partially because blaming systemic issue on culture can quickly devolve into outright racism), but on capitalist incentives once again - the common standard seems to be "as low in terms of quality as you can get away with", there is no market force pushing for better products, and no legal/regulatory pressure either.
This was the biggest takeaway for me in this post. In the past, to experiment with a particular piece of new hardware, we had to a) obtain the hardware, and b) obtain or create software for it. With a) fast becoming out-of-reach for most people, this puts a dampener on b).
I would have purchased this board in a heartbeat otherwise. Ugh.
There is also an open source driver for the NPU somewhere (Zhouyi NPU) and some documentation, but nothing in an upstream kernel yet. https://zhouyi-npu-tutorial.readthedocs.io/en/latest/0_radxa...
Their hardware is great, but they launch a product and then won't offer a proper distribution for it, hoping that some developers will take care of this for them, for free.
This is why I love Raspberry Pi so much: they care about the software just as much as about the hardware, if not even more. And that is great. Because the hardware, once you have it, that's it, it won't change.
I don't know about Raspberry OS, but when I installed Raspbian 12 Bookworm on my first-gen Raspi with 500MB RAM, it worked. It's now working as a VPN server.
See this, for example: The Zero 3e is a really great board, but this is the software they offer for it https://github.com/radxa-build/radxa-zero3/releases
3 weeks ago: internal test build
Apr 8: internal test build
Jan 10, 2024: beta 6: Currently there is an issue preventing the Debian CLI image from booting, and we suggest users to use the Desktop variant instead for now. Ubuntu CLI: This flavor is provided as-is except for critical issues. Users should look at Debian CLI as an alternative.
There are now community maintained Armbian variants, but it took a long time for them to appear. There was also a distibution by some other volunteer, but Radxa did nothing.
https://github.com/ARM-software/arm-systemready
I was under the impression that ARM China doesn't have the latest license to Armv9 and stops at Armv8. While ARM HQ opened a separate ARM Unit in Shanghai under a different name ARM Something ( Some Chinese Phonetics ). But CIX has had this SOC with Armv9 announced a while ago. So I assume ARM China is now officially back under ARM HQ / Softbank control?
By Control I dont mean just swapping a new CEO but the actual power structure of the company.
Didn’t expect this to just be available for ARM. It really is making its way out of „weird niche platform“ territory to „it’s just a PC“! Especially together with the SystemReady firmware.