I have always been interested in novel platforms. Back in the late 1990s, I ran Debian on an Alpha machine and was involved in the Alpha porting team; later, I helped boot Debian on amd64. Currently, I have about 8 Raspberry Pi devices in use, and the free NNCPNET internet email service I manage runs on an ARM instance from a cloud service provider.
ARM-based devices are cheap in many ways: they have low power consumption, and there are many affordable ARM-based single-board computers. In fact, my 8-year-old child’s computer is a Raspberry Pi 400.
So I like ARM.
I have been looking for ARM devices that support AES acceleration (the Raspberry Pi 4 does not), so I can use full disk encryption. As ARM devices start to shift towards the mid-range market, there are many options. The Radxa ROCK 5 series single-board computers support up to 32GB of RAM. The Orange Pi 5 Max and Ultra support up to 16GB of RAM, and the Raspberry Pi 5 does as well. Pine64’s Quartz64 supports up to 8GB of RAM. I believe all these devices support ARM cryptographic extensions. They are all compact, and most are quite affordable.
But I also dislike ARM. The ARM community severely lacks standardization. They claim their devices run Linux, but in reality, each vendor has its own customized Debian branch, and likely its own kernel branch. Most vendors do not maintain them well.
Imagine if you bought x86 hardware, you might have to manage systems like AcerOS, Dellbian, HPian, etc. Most of them lack security support (especially kernel security). Some are based on Debian 11 (released in 2021), some on Debian 12 (released in 2023), and not a single one is based on Debian 13 (released a month ago).
This is exactly the situation we encounter with ARM. While the Raspberry Pi 4 and earlier versions can run Debian trixie directly, Raspberry Pi has not yet provided upstream support for the Pi 5, and Raspberry Pi OS is only based on Debian bookworm (released in 2023) and explicitly states it does not support a key feature of Debian: you cannot upgrade from one version of Raspberry Pi OS to the next, so you need to completely reinstall every two years instead of just upgrading. OrangePiOS only supports Debian bookworm—but it is worth noting that the kernel versions of all their images mostly remain at 5.10 (bookworm comes with version 6.1, while bookworm-backports supports version 6.12).
Radxa has a page explaining how to run Debian on specific motherboards, but they seem to actually not support Debian directly, but rather support their own Radxa operating system. Each motherboard has a different installer; for example, this one is for Rock 4D. Upon checking, I found it uses files from here and here, with a custom kernel, gstreamer, u-boot, and for some reason, they put zfs in the home directory.
From Pine64’s perspective, the Quartz64 seems to be based on older kernels like 4.6 or 4.19. However, it might be possible to use Debian’s Pine A64+ instructions. Trixie does not have a u-boot image for Quartz64, but there are corresponding device tree files.
RISC-V seems to be worse; we not only encounter the same issues there, but the support in trixie is even more limited, and the performance of supported motherboards is also lacking.
Another option is mini PCs based on x86 architecture. There are many mini PCs on the market based on N100, N150, or Celeron processors. Many of these support AES-NI and are priced similarly to high-end ARM processors. There are also some noteworthy products on the market; for example, the Radxa X4 SBC features both N100 and RP2040. Many vendors offer fanless mini PCs. Companies like ZimaBoard have also launched some interesting products, such as ZimaBlade.
The power differences are becoming smaller; it seems that newer ARM motherboards require 20W or 30W power supplies, which may bring their prices close to those of mini PCs. As for costs, newer ARM motherboards require heatsinks and fans, so when you add SBCs, fans, storage, and other components, your price starts to enter the mini PC price range.
It is great to see a variety of small single-board computers (SBCs) featuring ARM and RISC-V processors available, but at some point, you have to give up and say, “this ecosystem has many problems,” and then consider reverting to x86. I am not sure if I fully understand, but I am getting close.
Update 2025-09-11: I found high-performance encryption options for Pi 4, but they are hindered by serial console issues.
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