New hardware suggestion

I am running ynh on a rpi4 now, I was wondering about migrating to an orange pi 5 as it has much more ram, 8GB became too little for my use.
Has anyone install ynh on an orange pi 5? Does it run well?

Hi jwqos,

The Orange Pi 5 looks quite exciting, especially the plus version! I only use Orange Pi Zero for Yunohost :stuck_out_tongue:

To check whether Yunohost will run, see whether the correct version of Debian is available and running on a platform. The current Yunohost 11 runs on Debian 11.

For Orange Pi you’d probably want to have a look at the Armbian images. They offer Bookworm (Debian 12). I don’t see any Bullseye (Debian 11) listed in their ‘additional images’ section.

To reply to your topic title, “New hardware suggestion”: if 8 GB of RAM is insufficient for your installation, it seems quite a busy place or some very memory intensive apps are installed. Maybe you could look for a low-power x86-64 platform. If you don’t need the I/O pins that the *Pi’s provide, there is a lot of choice.

Boards (single board as well as regular ITX) based on the newish Intel N100 processor support up to 16 GB of RAM, with power consumption not much higher than an OPi 5.

If the system is indeed heavily used, you could contemplate a power usage of up to 40-50 Watts, and have a much broader range of options (and lower prices second hand).

Out of interest, what makes your installation use so much RAM?

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I just found debian 11 for the orangepi 5, armbian in their forum I read about debian bullseye, but can’t find the image.
http://www.orangepi.org/html/hardWare/computerAndMicrocontrollers/service-and-support/Orange-pi-5.html
but the orange pi website redirects to a google drive link lol:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1F2uc8v_EQnvsNrevDihwoymOJlFgM-dZ
Not sure how safe it is to download that image without verifying it.

I would prefer an arm SBC with uboot(or tow-boot) than an x86 with a closed not upgradable BIOS.
My ynh is eating much ram because I have many apps installed and many users.

Orange Pi has been distributing their images via google drive for as long as I can remember. I never thought it a sustainable way, upgrade-wise. Maybe their built-in apt sources point to a regular Debian repository?

On the other hand, I never read about security issues relating to that (maybe because no-one used those images?)

You’d exchange closed, hardly upgdraded BIOSes pre-boot for closed-source binary blobs runtime on ARM, most of the time. RPi4 could be one exception, I recall earlier models needed a binary blob to boot, but did not pay enough attention to recent additions to the family anymore :wink:

It does shrink the number of options for x86 as well as for ARM considerably though. Libreboot-compatible systems, for x86, might be an option, but it is a very small set of (elderly) boards.

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So orange Pi does not have an open uboot like the rpi? Libreboot is too restrict, if x86 I would go with coreboot.

As far as I recall it runs uboot just as well as most ARM boards that run Linux. It is just that, at least some versions of Raspberry Pi for example, the board might need some closed source binary blobs to boot, even if using uboot.

Libreboot is restricted exactly because it does not allow any binary blobs for booting.

Coreboot (and uboot) themselves are open source, but that does not mean that the hardware they boot can boot without binary blobs. Depending on your reason for not using binary blobs (philosophical/political/criminal/ethical/…), that may or may not be a worry or consideration.

yeah I know how they work, but for my use uboot and coreboot are enough. Disabling wifi and bluetooth + not using non-free drivers from debian I think is a good setup.

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