Radxa Orion O6 - finally an arm64 board I'm happy with

The Radxa Orion O6 seems to be the arm64 device I've always wanted. Finally!

Because it supports UEFI boot, Debian can be installed with the vanilla installation media. Neither custom images, nor additional firmware, nor any other tricks were required on my end. In fact, the entire process was indistinguishable from the amd64 installations I've been accustomed to for two decades: just plug in a USB flash drive, boot, and install.

The system's specs are pretty neat. The CPU is ARMv9.2, though without SME, which would have been useful for debugging packages that use it in some way. It's also rich in interfaces, including a Gen4 PCIe x16 slot (with 8 lanes), which enables me to run tests utilizing GPUs. The BIOS version the board came with had a bug where WiFi was permanently disabled, but this has been fixed in the meantime. The only odd thing was the socket for the RTC battery: the CR1220 it requires seems to be rather niche: none of the hardware stores I visited carried it, so I had to order one online.

I installed Debian trixie to a NVMe drive, and for 6 months now, it has been running flawlessly. I've been using this board as a development and debugging system for arm64 optimizations, in particular for ggml's feature-specific arm64 backends which are hard to debug on our porterboxes. However, the host will soon transition to a general CI worker for AI/ML related packages, similar to the ROCm CI we've built for testing packages utilizing AMD GPUs.

I'll post more about this new CI soon.

Purchase of this board was funded by the Debian Project, and was thus enabled through your donations.