Very interesting. If this thing can run Ubuntu, presumably you can run any OS and customize it, right? When it comes to storage, I don’t want anything unless it’s zfs or some other feature equivalent system.
ARM SBCs often only work with a few "approved" distributions (downloaded from the SBC vendor) because the kernel patches required for it to boot aren't in mainline Linux.
There are a lot of distributions (and pieces of software) that care about compiling on ARM/other architectures thanks to various disparate things that exist -- raspberry pi's popularity, go/rust/and friends making cross compiling easier, etc.
I've had a good experience with ODROID U2 (I personally think ODROID is my favorite SBC producer, so I'm biased, but most have some debian-based or similar distro that you can run and be productive things with.
In the more concrete world, both ZFS and Ceph (Bluestore has checksuming now) run on ARM as far as I can tell:
Releasing a board meant for NASes that you can't run either of those on seems pretty short sighted for a company that's definitely not new to the SBC game.
Note that Ceph only supports 64-bits ARM, not 32-bits ARM. They removed binaries for the latter from their website, and the armhf port in Debian has a critical bug if you have non-armhf hosts in your cluster. https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=961481
Fortunately the Odroid HC4 is 64-bits, unlike its predecessors (HC1 and HC2).
There was a question asking after upstream support for the Odroid N2+, currently easily the fastest most powerful Single Board Computer (SBC) under $100 (starts at $63). I had a pretty robust answer then[1] with lots of details.
The short answer is: the Amlogic chip's ARM "Bifrost" GPU is still basically unusable, because ARM has a huge problem upstreaming anything, but that could maybe change some day. But the rest of the platform is what I would classify as "fantastically well supported", and will run excellently with a mainline kernel (and also with fantastic uboot support)[2].
We're still some time away from boot-systems being standardized, so uboot is "the" way to go pretty much now, which targets embedded systems, but eventually we all hope the Server Based Boot Requirements[3]- which mandate ACPI and UEFI support- will become semi-standard, such that we can use better secured & more capable standardized bootloaders.
Not necessarily. I know at least the older Amlogic (805?) based boards run a custom kernel, which ended up stuck at a specific version. You can't just install any arm distro on them, it needs to be specifically built with the hacked up kernel. And support tends to end sooner and get spotty (it looks like Odroid C1 is finally supported by Armbian, but hadn't been for quite some time). I don't know how much of this applies to this specific board, but there's a lot we take for granted in x86/amd64 land.
