ODroid-XU4 thoughts.

About a week ago I managed to pickup an Odroid-XU4 from HardKernel and overall have had a very good first impression of it.

The hardware itself is a bit of a powerhouse, 2ghz, 2 gigs of ram, and 8 cores, 4 cores being high power 4 of them low power hooked together with the BIG.little architecture. It is a pretty solid piece of hardware and gives me something I have been looking for for a while, a small credit card sized ARM device with a gigabit network port. Then to top it all off it has 2 USB 3.0 ports on it, active cooling, and the ability to boot from the USB ports, network, or a MicroSD card. This machine can literally be used as its own kernel development platform if you plan it out right.

Really the only gripes I have with it are due to how Samsung is handling their Exynos platform you will always require some binary blobs to boot the thing, at least until Samsung gives HardKernel the OK to dump the source for the blobs so you can make self signed versions of them, and no OpenBSD support. The latter I have been working with a few members of the OpenBSD community to see if I can help change and it has been a reminder of why I should have actually learned ASM eons ago. But the former issue really is sort of heartbreaking for such a great bit of hardware. I would really like to encourage more vendors to release stuff totally in the open, there should be no reason I can not make my own Trusted Boot signatures for this and decide to not trust Samsungs sigs. But other than that I am looking forward to turning this guy into a bastion box, maybe make it my primary Syncthing hub since it does have some USB 3.0 ports on it.