non-x86 open-source-hardware laptops, let's take stock of March 2024

[DiTBho]

Called "cyberdeck" to play the usual clickbait game on YouTube, it's rather a RISC-V mini (dev?) laptop.
He said "very slow". Umm, well it's faster than my japanese PDA with an Intel PXA ARM@400Mhz.
It's rather the keyboard that sucks!

[DiTBho]

This one, built in 2010, should make more sense if rebuilt in 2024 with RISC-V 

Anyway, I need a damn GeeThree Serial Port for my Power Macintosh G4.
As I am going to remove the graphic card.

Code: [Select]

macmini2-intel /mnt/disk3/src/machine/platform/powerpc/PowerMacG4/mdd/kernel/kernel-6.6.16-ppc-PowerMac-mdd-2xG4 # ./mybuild-2024 2
[step2] compiling
kernel-6.6.16(powerpc/powermac-mdd-2xG4)
note: experimental, SMP, Zserial
toolchain(powerpc-unknown-linux-gnu:2.34.0/9.3.0)
-----------------------------------------------
checking myhost as qualified_host ... success
checking .config ... success
-----------------------------------------------
gadget_to_do(build) ... overlay/build
cleaning ................ done
gadget_to_do(clean) ... kernel/clean
app_machine=PPC7455-PowerMac-MDD-SMP, server-profile-250Hz
building kernel ...
but that stuff is so rare that when it appears on eBay it is listed for 300 euros 

[Nominal Animal]

If one searches for rk3399 or 3566 in development mailing list subjects, it is true that many patches are submitted by others, but there are @rockchip.com devs there too, both submitting and reviewing patches.  So, I don't agree with kreyren's assessment, especially if one compares to Allwinner (provides nothing).  Intel and AMD have more developers working for them, being much bigger companies, but relatively speaking, I'm pretty happy Rockchip provides the developer support it does.  Even more would help, of course.

Having a nice keyboard and a nice IPS or similar display with wide viewing angles and preferably no dead pixels, seems very difficult in the laptop land.  Even the big manufacturers often fail in this.

[brucehoult]

He said "very slow". Umm, well it's faster than my japanese PDA with an Intel PXA ARM@400Mhz.

Yearling is almost as much of an Arm (and Pi) bigot as Dr TechTechPotato (did you know he's got an advanced degree? Like half the people in the tech world don't). It's sooo slow because it's about the same as an ancient Pi 4. As if that wasn't the fastest Pi only half a year ago.

The C910 even has the RISC-V equivalent of SVE2, which no Arm SBC has -- pre-ratification draft 0.7.1 of the V extension, which is just now starting to get proper software support, with GCC14 supporting both 0.7.1 (renamed to XTheadVector) which is in a couple of billion devices, and also RVV 1.0, which is right now only available (at least in SBCs) on one board, the CanMV-K230 with a single core CPU and 0.5 GB RAM.

The problem is not the hardware [1] but that it takes time for new hardware to get good quality support upstreamed. TH1520 boards have only been out since July or so. The Pi 4 also took a couple of years to get decent support.

Heck -- it took six or seven years before the 64 bit Pi 3 got an offically-supported 64 bit OS!

[1] of course it's not as fast as the new hotness RK3588 boards in the Arm world, such as that Pi 5 that came out half a year ago (but is unobtanium) or the Rock 5 and Orange Pi 5 which have been out a year or two. RISC-V boards faster than RK3588 are due out towards the end of the year.

[Veteran68]

[1] of course it's not as fast as the new hotness RK3588 boards in the Arm world, such as that Pi 5 that came out half a year ago (but is unobtanium)

Pi 5's have been obtainable for awhile now. I just picked up another (8GB) last week when I stopped by MicroCenter here in the states. Pishop.us, where I normally buy them online, also has them in stock. If you're not able to find them, it must be a regional thing.

[brucehoult]

[1] of course it's not as fast as the new hotness RK3588 boards in the Arm world, such as that Pi 5 that came out half a year ago (but is unobtanium)

Pi 5's have been obtainable for awhile now. I just picked up another (8GB) last week when I stopped by MicroCenter here in the states. Pishop.us, where I normally buy them online, also has them in stock. If you're not able to find them, it must be a regional thing.

Mine arrived in late November (ordered in September). I'm just reporting what I (still) read on the interwebs.

[DiTBho]

I don't agree with kreyren's assessment

I do not know. I don't understand that kreyren dude too much, and I have no other official/unofficial answers from Olimex.

It seems that the interest is close to zero, and worse still, I expected much more participation from people who develop rather than people who come to me in private and ask - "what distro do you install?" - rather than - "what patch do you use/did you write and apply to fix that issue?".

As an added value for the choice of a specific Allwinner SoC, Specter&C non-vulnerabilities were mentioned three times, which... makes no sense for me 

[DiTBho]

Having a nice keyboard and a nice IPS or similar display with wide viewing angles and preferably no dead pixels, seems very difficult in the laptop land.  Even the big manufacturers often fail in this.

if we look at my Japanese handheld, it's even smaller than a mini-laptop, the keys on the keyboard are noticeably smaller, and are of the same type as those used in pocket calculators, I have been using it daily for 10 years and I can assure you that they are much less annoying to use than those of some mini-laptops.

Here they actually took the body of a 2010 product designed for Intel Atom, replaced the motherboard with something RISC_V, and reused the keyboard and then the LCD display from a tablet.

Not that it's absolutely wrong, it saves a lot of engineering hours, but for me it's wrong not to take care of primary details like the keyboard!
In fact in the comments below the video, as expected, it is pointed out that that keyboard is very uncomfortable for using the mini-laptop as an ssh network console.

[DiTBho]

Yearling is almost as much of an Arm (and Pi) bigot

A "bigot" is a person who is obstinately and/or unreasonably attached to { belief, opinion, faction } especially one who is prejudiced against or antagonistic toward a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group.

Jeff ... umm, I think he simply makes videos for money, and has sponsors who pay him and send him hardware, so he deliberately acts as an influencer with/for RPI/ARM 

The problem is not the hardware but that it takes time for new hardware to get good quality support upstreamed

In the case of a laptop, you must also consider that it is not enough to "throw an SBC into the shell reused from a previous product", especially if the shell comes from a product that was hastily engineered at the time.

That is, the point is: we don't have fast hardware because we don't have mature upstream support yet. Ok, I understand, but then if we design motherboards with interchangeable SoM modules precisely to give the possibility of making upgrades without having to change the entire laptop, then... let's start by designing the frame, the keyboard, the trackpad, and the screen, and make them brilliant instead of poor!

It seems strange, but NO ONE is doing it! 

[brucehoult]

Yearling is almost as much of an Arm (and Pi) bigot

A "bigot" is a person who is obstinately and/or unreasonably attached to { belief, opinion, faction } especially one who is prejudiced against or antagonistic toward a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group.

Jeff ... umm, I think he simply makes videos for money, and has sponsors who pay him and send him hardware, so he deliberately acts as an influencer with/for RPI/ARM 

Well, yes, it's hard to say if it's true belief or financially-influenced.  Either way .. let's say less than objective.

Historically I love Arm stuff. I was playing with Archimedes in the 80s, hacking Newtons in the 90s, professionally programming ARM7TDMI in BREW phones in the mid 2000s, followed by jailbreaking and porting our BREW software to iPhone as soon as they came out (I mean weeks). I own almost every Pi ever made (I seem to be the only person with an A7 Pi 2, not A53, because I ordered one the day they were announced). I even love my Arm-based Mac.

But I think I can be a lot more objective about where RISC-V is at right now, and how fast it is catching up.

but then if we design motherboards with interchangeable SoM modules precisely to give the possibility of making upgrades without having to change the entire laptop, then... let's start by designing the frame, the keyboard, the trackpad, and the screen, and make them brilliant instead of poor!

It seems strange, but NO ONE is doing it! 

You may have missed the $1500 DC-Roma, which is designed for interchangeable SoM CPU modules, but with (presumably) higher quality components around it.

The problem is if people don't want to pay $400 for Pi 3 - Pi 4 performance then they certainly don't want to pay $1500! For that money I just bought a 5.4 GHz (turbo) 24 core x86 laptop with ... well ... fairly good quality components.

[DiTBho]

You may have missed the $1500 DC-Roma, which is designed for interchangeable SoM CPU modules, but with (presumably) higher quality components around it.

The problem is if people don't want to pay $400 for Pi 3 - Pi 4 performance then they certainly don't want to pay $1500! For that money I just bought a 5.4 GHz (turbo) 24 core x86 laptop with ... well ... fairly good quality components.

well, the DC-Roma is kind of legendary dogma for me ...

I opened the topic precisely because the 12 months of the announcement have expired and no one has published a Video on Youtube or a review yet.
You stated that some of your colleagues received the laptop, and I edited the topic, because otherwise I would think that it was never made, and this is what we also read on Reddit (1y ago).

For reasons that I don't understand well, Google didn't find this article, with much more recent information.

However, it is not necessary to make a case in magnesium, titanium or aluminium, all complex things, therefore expensive for small productions, and impossible (especially titanium, I have a fair amount of experience with ti-frames for bicycles) to manage without specific equipment.

Ania still studies at Tallinn University of Technology, but she designed and created the shell of a vt220 terminal in laptop-shape using laser cutting of PVC sheets, to be glued, and mounted with m3 support screws, and to be sanded with sandpaper, and painted with pantograph (she likes green paints), and a HHKB/Lite (the cheapest, with arrow keys) for keyboard..., a trackpoint disassembled from a Thinkpad keyboard and for LCD a 1024x768 VGA module with neon backlight.

It's all one solid block once assembled - "as thick as a brick" - so she uses to say, laughing, but it has just enough space to hold the HHKB kb, which is very thick but also high quality, and all the electronics comfortably.

She focused on the five things that matter
- battery, refillable styluses
- LCD, 4:3, 14"
- quality keyboard and trackpoint <--- got as second hand, 60 euro both
- space for housing the process module and enough airflow for its integrated heat-shield
- cost < 300 euro

I believe people with industrial design skills can even do better than this! Rather than taking some crappy Chinese shells and reuse them.

Which both Olimex and Lichee also did, and if you take a sample of 10 people, 8 complain about it, because, talking about the Teres1, I can assure you that it really sucks as keyboard and touchpad.

And, worst of all, neither company has plans to give the possibility to upgrade (not even with a second purchasable upgrade-premium-kit), meaning no one in the internal engineering departments cares about it, as they believe it's the community has to solve the problem!

In fact, if Ania used a laser cutting machine provied by her university, you read comments from people who wonder how to 3D print a new case, given that 500 euro hobby printers don't have enough printing area, and few, very few have C02 lasers for cutting other materials, and even fewer users have CNCs at home.

In short... the problem is precisely the attitude: selling "products", telling the various communities, for everything, starting from firmware, kernel, userspace, and mechanics, "now make do"

[DiTBho]

2010, MIPS laptop ... 

[Nominal Animal]

if we look at my Japanese handheld, it's even smaller than a mini-laptop, the keys on the keyboard are noticeably smaller, and are of the same type as those used in pocket calculators, I have been using it daily for 10 years and I can assure you that they are much less annoying to use than those of some mini-laptops.

Yep.  It is rather telling that on the laptop I'm typing this (HP EliteBook i840 G4, ~ 6 years old) I'm on my third keyboard already, and have a fourth one ready for when I get annoyed enough by the current one.  (I only destroyed one accidentally with hot tea with milk and honey, the rest by typing.)  Second battery, too: first one puffed up enough to twist the plastic shell, shearing one self-tapping screw (the plastic surrounding the screw, not the metal screw, of course).

When I use standard keyboards, I take them apart and wash the washable parts every six months or so, because imperfect response annoys me more than having to disassemble, clean, vacuum, wash, and assemble them.  Same with HID mice.

for me it's wrong not to take care of primary details like the keyboard!
In fact in the comments below the video, as expected, it is pointed out that that keyboard is very uncomfortable for using the mini-laptop as an ssh network console.

For me, the keyboard and the display (viewing angles, performance with low-intensity backlight, no flicker, no dead pixels if at all possible) are the most important thing in any laptop or minilaptop.

The second most important thing is whether I can maintain, debug, and fix issues I may encounter with it.  I am even willing to use closed-source binary blob drivers via dkms (i.e., with a C shim, so one can relink it for custom kernels) for better subsystem performance, if I can use open source drivers for degraded performance when debugging and fixing kernel-level issues.  I prefer not to, but I will if the device otherwise suits me.
I haven't had a computer yet I could not tweak to better fit my use cases and workflow, so I fully expect and require to be able to do so in the future too.

Third most important thing is connectivity.  I want a couple of USB ports, a gigabit ethernet, and a headphone jack at minimum.

Fourth most important thing is accelerated hardware decoding for standard video formats up to 1080p, because I don't want the device to get too hot when I watch a Youtube video.

Stuff like CPU speed, amount of RAM, storage speed, et cetera only come after.  I was quite productive with an early Linux minilatop fifteen years ago, so I know what I need, and how to overcome limitations posed by limited resources.  Stuff like battery capacity and longevity is more complicated: an unreplaceable battery (glued or component-twinned, no OEM replacements available) is a strict no-no regardless of capacity, but if easily replaced (modular) and I could have one or two spares, I might accept even quite low capacity.  I don't care much about the weight, either.

[DiTBho]

... something ingenious that drove me crazy: Ania designed a keyboard for a laser pantograph, designed all the silkscreening of the QWERTY keys, US layout, then used the laser pantograph in her university lab to cut things on a thin sheet of balsa wood.

This way, she made wooden key-caps for the keyboard keys, which he then glued onto each key. Damn, I tried it today – 200% better improvement!!! Both immediately to the touch and in complete comfort after 2 hours of use

Now I want a laptop with wooden key-caps!!!

[Nominal Animal]

That is one of the biggest reasons I like woodworking: the feel of wood, and wood-like plants like bamboo, is superior to plastics and metals.

My favourite one is Nordic birch (specifically betula pendula and betula pubescens) treated with beeswax and food-grade mineral oil mix (often called "salad bowl mix"), or just food-grade mineral oil.  (Use walnut oil or similar, if you want to tint it a bit; it is very pale wood.)  The tactile feel is superb, and by controlling the smoothness (the grit to which you sand it before oiling and waxing) you can vary it.  If it gets damaged, just sand it and re-treat.

Balsa has a specific tactile feeling too, and being so lightweight, will not add, uh, inertia? weight? to the keys, so I'm not at all surprised they yield excellent keycap tops.  Because balsa is a "porous" softwood, she should consider using mineral oil, beeswax, or a mix to make the tops cleanable (with a damp cloth).  Human fingers do emit oils anyway.  Test with a test piece first and let sit for a few days to find out how the finish affects the look and feel.

(Also: you can get an even slightly better feel by sanding the top so that it is very slightly concave, vertically, with left and right sides coming up higher than the center.  I dislike the dimples in F and J keys, but like the top concavity a lot myself, because I often "rest" my fingers on top of the keys; it's more comfortable to me.  You can do the sanding using a wooden dowel wrapped with sandpaper after cutting, or making the tops in vertical strips and routing the concave part before cutting the strip off a wider block before laser engraving.)

[audiotubes]

Dunno anything about the Chinese-~MIPS64(1) laptops ... 

(1) ~MIPS64 are not 100% MIPS64-ISA compliant.

The Loongson MIPS implementation is a superset of MIPS64 if I remember correctly. I doubt that anyone would ever notice the difference except if you're writing MIPS assembly and even then probably not very much.

I don't have the laptop and haven't seen one, but I have two Loongson Fuloong boxes which are almost paperback book sized boxes that are good, silent, very low power consumption boxes quite nice for server use. Been running OpenBSD on them for about 10 years I think. One is an ftp server, the other is an emulation host for SIMH VAX.

[brucehoult]

well, the DC-Roma is kind of legendary dogma for me ...

I opened the topic precisely because the 12 months of the announcement have expired and no one has published a Video on Youtube or a review yet.

Not everyone makes videos on everything they buy. I don't, for example. Youtube videos are an unreliable way of checking if something exists, especially things neither kids nor rich conspicuous consumers (who have the same motives) will be buying. But I found this in five seconds: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IaZJNqG_nlo

You stated that some of your colleagues received the laptop, and I edited the topic,

One ex-colleague, Krste, was given one at a conference in August or September. Others in /r/risc-v preordered them like normal people and received them in ... I don't remember ... October or November?

because otherwise I would think that it was never made, and this is what we also read on Reddit (1y ago).

That was a year ago. They indeed had not shipped then. They shipped half a year ago.

Tech products, unfortunately, often don't hit their previously announced shipping dates. My confidence levels were low on this one, mostly due to their bullshit marketing materials talking about crypto or something. But they did ship, and only a few months after various JH7110 and TH1520 SBCs shipped. They were apparently planning versions with both those SoC (TH1520 as "pro") but that hasn't been seen yet and may have been a retro-fitted plan as the TH1520 was the only one mentioned in late 2022, but JH7110 is what people have received.

[SiliconWizard]

We will announce no Apple before its time.

[DiTBho]

Umm the Gdium Liberty 1000 laptop (Loongson-2F)
Reading at a review, it doesn't look so good
(~400 euro + S/H + importing fees, from Alixexpress/China)

Pros
+Free Firmware
+Decent keyboard

Cons
-Poor touchpad
-Sluggish performance
-Short battery life <-------------- this is a serious problem!
-Chassis gets hot <---------------- combined with this!

[DiTBho]

We will announce no Apple before its time.

Did you know that Apple was secretly working on a "i-Car"? 
A failed project that couldn't be more failed, in that case they were right not to let anyone know anything
LOL 

[DiTBho]

~MIPS64 are not 100% MIPS64-ISA compliant.

The Loongson MIPS implementation is a superset of MIPS64 if I remember correctly. I doubt that anyone would ever notice the difference except if you're writing MIPS assembly and even then probably not very much.

The history of the Loongson is very controversial.

Loongson's CPUs relied on various types of the company's LoongISA architecture { v1, v2, v3, ... } as - time by time - custom subset of the MIPS64 architecture. Such a tactic - somehow - enabled the company to preserve compatibility with programs designed for MIPS64 while bringing in its own extensions to improve performance in contemporary applications.

The problem is that "somehow" ...
Who? What?

I have a terrible habit of collecting prototypes and weird computers when people get bored and parking them on eBay, or when they threaten to crush them in a hydraulic press.

I took the plane and flew to Sweden to collect in person a brand-new HPPA C3750 Workstation, left in a company's warehouse. The new owners weren't willing to pack it because it's heavy (30Kg) and the original HP parcel is very big (the packaging includes approximately 40 cm of polystyrene all around a full tower chassis), so they put up an advert, not very descriptive because they didn't have the faintest idea what that computer was, but they put up photos of the box, still closed with the HP seals!

Likewise I recovered an IDT prototype of one of the very first evaluation boards (therefore with profiling and debugger heads) of a MIPS R2K! Note that all commercial applications (including the SONY Playstation1) used R3K!

Worse yet, I have a 2006 "Godson" Eval SBC(2). A card with very little stuff on it. CPU, RAM, Ethernet, and a lon that lacks those special unaligned load/store instructions that almost never serve any purpose, except when you have a misaligned address.

It's not MIPS64 but rather MIPSIII/64bit , and wasn't even supposed to come out of China, and actually remained in China until 2010, when about the same thing happened as what happened with the HP workstation (what money can do ... and I offered only 200 euro for that thing), and so, somehow it landed on my table .

It's an early implementation, and lacks the unaligned load-store instructions patented by MIPS Technologies.
It's not a problem, something like this, for different reasons, I encountered it on the MIPS4 used by SGI on Indigo2 systems, and the solution workaround is very simple: the missing instructions can be emulated by other instructions, just ... either you patch the machine layer of Gcc, or ...

Code: [Select]

mips-gcc -c -S hAllo.c -o hAllo.s1
mips-fix hAllo.s1 hAllo.s                 # intercept the assembly it generates, and replace those missing instructions
mips-as hAllo.s -o hAllo.o
Ugly, but it somehow works for those bloody MIPS-like chips

• 2001-2007: MIPS-like, compatible with { MIPSII, MIPSIII } but misses unaligned load-store instructions
• 2007-2020: LoongISA, MIPS64 compatibile, the ISA comes with extra custom instructions, very useful to speed up Qemu/{x86, arm}
• 2021-2024: LoongArch -> wtf?!? breakup with MIPS, in-house LoongArch architecture, no more compatible(1) and it needs a dedicated toolchain

Then, after 2007 Loongson was fully MIPS64-based instead of MIPS-like, but then, I don't know why, the technical documentation (the small one in English) started mentioning "LoongISA" and "LoongArch" as if they were different ISA, and this is also what we saw in the various gcc patches, and for a few years it was synonymous with "enriched MIPS32 superset", then with the 2021 "Loongson3-5000 series" it really became something else, completely incompatible.

In Gentoo, ARCH=loong, instead of mips64, and the target tuple is "loongarch64-unknown-linux-gnu", instead of "mips64-unknown-linux-gnu".
LoongArch (>=2021 (3)) is not binary compatible with either MIPS or RISC-V, although the ISA and ABI show heavy influence of the two.
There are six ABIs defined for LoongArch, much like those of RISC-V. But for Gentoo, the profile focuses on LP64D only first, multilib support will come later.

(1) - "Loongson Architecture LoongArch has nothing to do with MIPS and other architectures designed outside of China" - say Chinese dev-guys
LoongArch is divided into two versions { LA32-bit, LA64-bit }.
LA64 applications are application-level backward binary compatibility with LA32 applications, and that *is supposed to* mean LA32 applications can run directly on the machine compatible with LA64, but the behavior of system softwares { firmware, kernel, userland } on the machine compatible with LA32 is not guaranteed to be the same as on the machine compatible with LA64.

(2) all LoongArch systems are little-endian, while my dev board is big-endian, and can be set little-endian with a jumper.

(3) []={ 2K0500, 2K1000LA, 3A5000, 3A5000L, 3A5000HV, 3B5000, 3C5000, 3C5000L, 3C5000L, ... }
it can be hard to tell whether a particular Loongson chip is implementing "LoongArch" or "MIPS", especially for casual users 

[DiTBho]

Nordic birch

Perhaps we have found the right business!!!
Making kits for covering keyboard keys with good wood 

[SiliconWizard]

We will announce no Apple before its time.

Did you know that Apple was secretly working on a "i-Car"? 
A failed project that couldn't be more failed, in that case they were right not to let anyone know anything
LOL 

If you know about it, that's not much of a secret.

The above quote (with a drawing) was found in an early Apple business plan for what would become the Macintosh.

[geerlingguy]

this is the other Jeff. His video is... hilarious since he's collecting old Macs 

Yeah, nice clickbaity title. I don't even blame, that's just the game.

Yup, part of the Youtube game.

Even when he installs ram-sticks which are NOT supported, and then complains that the mac doesn't work.
Or when he says he wants to relive the emotion of the Mac of the time (2002), and then he installs SSD.
RoFTL

Oh, but how I would like a Sonnet Tempo s/ATA PCI64/PCI-X HBA ... 

(and a s/ATA port inside the teres1 ... )

Well... to be fair, OWC's website listed those sticks as being compatible with the MDD, and I didn't go to EveryMac to double-check the specs. They even worked, they just wouldn't boot about 50% of the time, and the other 50% one of the four sticks (randomly) wouldn't show up in System Profiler. So could just be the fact my motherboard was one of the earlier MDD revisions, and later ones were compatible with PC3200.

All's well that ends well, though, and after I looked up the actual spec on EveryMac, I ordered the right DIMMs, and they worked fine.

And regarding SSD, it's mostly so I don't have to sit for the old spinner while loading stuff up. That's the least fun part of reliving a retro experience. I still have the old spinning HDDs (with a full image taken on my NAS so I can restore to another drive if the rusty drive breaks), and can plug them in to relive the clickety clack if needed.

The bigger thing is I am trying to document all my findings with those Macs in a way where other people can learn how to do the upgrades right on the first try (for example G4 MDD build log).

[DiTBho]

Well... to be fair

I as a "viewer" (user?) have every right to judge a video I watch, and that video is simply clickbait that says absolutely nothing new.
Too bad, it had potential, but for me, the only "good" part is when the other YouTubers intervene.

The bigger thing is I am trying to document all my findings with those Macs in a way where other people can learn how to do the upgrades right on the first try (for example G4 MDD build log).

There are YouTubers who have been doing it for years

• ActionRetro
• ...

and there are dedicated forums

• 68kmla (where @ActionRetro reads and writes)
• ...

that at least present better discussions than the bullshit I usually read in the Youtube comments(1).
I don't blame Youtube, simply it's not the platform to "discuss" anything.

also because if the public is the one who expects "entertainment", the discussions will never be on a technical level but precisely on nerd phenomenology.
Pretty like you t-shirts: uuuhh, ahhhh I recompile the kernel 



(1) for example, one YouTuber made a mini series of two videos to point out that the softRAID kernel built on the { ext3, ext4, xfs, ... } filesystem is totally unreliable, so "You MUST use ZFS, because ummm you must! don't be a caveman!!!", this was his message!

That's bullshit for me, and since people like me have been using SoftRAID on xfs for over 20 years (since kernel 2.6.) without any catastrophic problems, I spent a lot of time writing him two loooooong comments to point out that his reasoning didn't take into account the observation of the S.M.A.R.T. logs, plus other tricks like making a "safe" version of "/bin/cp" that checks the content checksums (md5? sha?) in userspace of both source and target, so adding in userspace a feature to a filesystem that doesn't provide content checksums in kernel space.

This, plus making backups, and periodically observing S.M.A.R.T. to be sure the HDD is not going to die.

It works. It has alwasys worked, even on HDDs that actually died. Never lost a single byte!

No dice! There is no way. Here on the forum it was enough to open a topic and everyone noticed. On Youtube my comment was ignored by the author himself, and the average of the comments was ALL about the phenomenology of how "nice" it is to get a NAS, with ZFS on it.

Worse still to this, another level of bigotry on Youtube is added by proposing to the point of exasperation "RPI" as NAS.