I am a huge fan of my Rock 5 ITX+. It wraps an ATX power connector, a 4-pin Molex, PoE support, 32 GB of eMMC, front-panel USB 2.0, and two Gen 3×2 M.2 slots around a Rockchip 3588 SoC that can slot into any Mini-ITX case. Thing is, I never put it in a case because the microSD slot lives on the side of the board, and pulling the case out and removing the side panel to install a new OS got old with a quickness.
I originally wanted to rackmount the critter, but adding a deracking difficulty multiplier to the microSD slot minigame seemed a bit souls-like for my taste. So what am I going to do? Grab a microSD extender and hang that out the back? Nay! I’m going to neuralyze the SPI flash and install some Kelvin Timeline firmware that will allow me to boot and install generic ARM Linux images from USB.
↫ Interfacing Linux
Using EDK2 to add UEFI to an ARM board is awesome, as it solves some of the most annoying problems of these ARM boards: they require custom images specifically prepared for the board in question. After flashing EDK2 to this board, you can just boot any ARM Linux distribution – or Windows, NetBSD, and so on – from USB and install it from there. There’s still a ton of catches, but it’s a clear improvement.
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