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by Brian_K_White 692 days ago
But x86 boards have vastly fewer kernel & driver support problems.

It's not even close, not even in the same order of magnitude.

The problem is not "sbc", the problem is "arm sbc"

Running on a random "unsupported" x86 board is no more of a problem than an unsupported laptop. There are sometimes no drivers for some peripheral but it's nothing like arm where you can't even boot without a dtd and most of the hardware has some freak custom interface instead of just pcie and usb and well known chips.

Every single arm board is like it's own whole different platform. A Bananna Pi Foo A and a Bannana Pi Foo A+ both with nominally the same cpu and specs might as well be a trs-80 and an appollo guidance computer when it comes to bringing them up.

1 comments

IMO the logic is reversed. Wintel phenomenon created enormous incentives for everyone to follow IBM PC "spec". That was odd, and it's ARM SBC situation that is more normal.