Thursday, October 22, 2020

Re: Multiple USB NICs

2020-10-22 07:35, Stuart Longland wrote:
> PCIe devices _can_ be connected to a
> Raspberry Pi 4, but it's a rather hap-hazard process that's not
> recommended unless you _really_ like re-working high-speed data links
> on
> printed circuit boards.
>
> Closest you get on a 'Pi is maybe some of the SPI Ethernet ICs that you
> might be able to hook to the GPIO header, but then you'd have to hack
> the OpenBSD kernel to support it, and it won't support gigabit speeds.

That's not entirely true anymore. Just the other day the RPi Compute
Module 4
was released. It exposes the PCI interface.

From the Datasheet [1]
2.3. PCIe (Gen2 x1)
The CM4 has an internal PCIe 2.0 x1 host controller. While on the
Raspberry Pi 4,
Model B this has been connected to a USB 3 host controller (using the
Via Labs
VLI805), on the CM4 the product designer is free to choose how the
interface is
used.

> A standard x86 machine and a multi-port network card is looking pretty
> good at this point.

Yes, this still holds true. If low power consumption is not crucial, I
too would
rather go for a decent amd64 plattform.

[1]: https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/cm4/cm4-datasheet.pdf

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