Radxa Rock 5 ITX: 8-Core ARM Mini ITX Board with LPDDR5 RAM (opens in new tab)

UEFI is not enough if you don't have all the drivers in the OS image, especially the GPU drivers. Last year I bought a cheap Windows Qualcomm 8xx ARM tablet on sale and it was very nice for the money but I returned it when none of the ARM Linux ISOs I found online could boot on it despite the tablet having UEFI support, because Qualcomm.

Booting Linux distros out of the box is such a non-issue on X86 that we take it for granted when on ARM it's just a pipe dream.

If the ARM PC future is all proprietary custom firmware blobs that need to patched for each SoC/motherboard for Linux to boot, then you can keep them, I'll stick to X86 thank you very much.

FWIW, there is a port of EDK2 to the RK3588, which is what powers this board. Most of the peripherals work. So that's nice. But the thing is, it isn't UEFI so much as the device-tree/ACPI distinction you need to be mindful of. ARM systems use both methods (whereas everything on x86 is ACPI.) You can use either DTBs (kernel configuration option) or ACPI to boot Linux on this device, though. https://github.com/edk2-porting/edk2-rk3588

Bingo. Basically ARM SystemReady SR or gtfo.

In practice that means Ampere Altra CPU. There was a uatx board released recently that seems viable, if bit pricy.

https://www.servethehome.com/asrock-rack-altrad8ud-1l2t-revi...

https://www.arm.com/architecture/system-architectures/system...

A tiny subset of UEFI would be nice (ability to load files from a fat32/exfat/something partition, framebuffer, memory map). Also a subset of ACPI (enumeration of PCI devices) and XHCI (enumeration of USB devices). That's enough of a starting point where you can load drivers, and show the user an error if there's unknown hardware.

Same thing I'm thinking as well when it comes to ARM PC's, being restricted to a specifically patched distro is very limiting.

How do we know it doesn't? I didn't see any info in the linked page about the system firmware, though I could easily have missed it.

RK3588 has pretty good mainline kernel support

Because the form factor is the point of this board. There are already other smaller SBCs with the same SoC but with much less connectivity.

This is aimed at desktop use. I guess it would be hard to mount if it was smaller than mini-ITX spec and/or wouldn't mount firmly on some/many desktop cases.

The whole point of this product is that it is standard ITX sized. Radxa has several sibling products with smaller footprints, e.g. Rock 5C https://radxa.com/products/rock5/5c/

Why not bigger? Why not a full-size ITX mainboard? There's no pleasing everyone.

Its as large as the IO Panel. Also that space is for an M2 drive, no?

The M.2 is PCIe. 4 lanes of Gen 3. You can get an adapter if you want the traditional form factor.

But then you give up the storage :/

2x 2.5Gb/s interfaces are pretty chunky on this spec of board, isn't it?

Not sure if this was added or edited later, but the linked article clarifies:

ROCK 5 ITX Power over Ethernet (PoE) Here we can see that the PoE module is not soldered in and connects using 8 pins which is quite nice. If you choose to power the ROCK 5 ITX via a PoE switch (the ROCK 5 ITX doesn’t provide PoE power to another device) you can expect to get 25W of power budget for the system itself and any peripherals/devices you plan to power from the boards connectors.

(my summary of that quoted section:) So, you can power the board with PoE, which will give the board and any connected devices 25W of power budget. Without looking at the specs of the CPU/GPU, that's probably enough to run at least one m.2 drive and a couple USB peripherals?

The article says there are three ways to power it. The ATX power supply connector, a DC barrel jack, and some third way not specified.

It does have a USB3 port so that might be it, or it could be PoE. Very unclear from the couple of articles.

Ah, you power this device via PoE and it can then draw up to 25W from a PoE switch feeding it. You cannot power another device via PoE with the ROCK 5 ITX as the source

ATX and mini-ITX should use the same size IO shield.

They did mention on their forums that a ROCK 6 ITX would likely come with socketed RAM but that's not likely to be until later this year sadly

4GB LPDDR5: $99 8GB LPDDR5: $119 16GB LPDDR5: $159 32GB LPDDR5: $239

Actual vendors aren't known yet but I imagine allnetchina, arace, and OKdo for the EU/UK market will be supplying them