Right. OP’s board is arm64 I believe.
I believe this board isn’t arm64, because uname shows it’s a armv7l, and the first arm64 processor is based on ARMv8-A.
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I see. You do what you see reasonable, but if I were planning such a project I’d go for a arm64 board to make it more future proof. Think virtualization, hardware security extensions, 2038 clock bug, UEFI support.
Well, I probably underestimated the complexity of this project…
If I can start again I will probably use something more future-proof such as PineBook Pro.
As for the virtualization, I don’t know how useful it’s gonna to be on boards with limited RAM and CPU resources. AFAIK, even high-end boards (e.g. RPi 4, PineBook Pro) have only 4GB of RAM, minus at least ~500MB required by a Gateway VM and a host system, the amount of RAM left might not be enough for user to do the actual work.
That’s also why I prefer to use some kind of lightweight container rather than virtualization.
However, I believe it’s possible to run KVM on C201, but I might have to hack the firmware to start the kernel in HYP mode.
Some useful links:
Well, it might be just enough for some basic work. 500 MB isn’t that much. Now, let’s say it’s 1GB. That would mean there would be 3GB RAM left. This should still be enough for usecases were you don’t have lots of tabs/programs running at the same time. Yes, most ARM SoCs, while being capable of 64-bit calculations, only have 32-bit memory addressing, which means there’s a limit of 4GB most of the time, thus that’s the most one would typically see soldered to such a board. There are ARM boards (not actual SBCs though) that support more, such as the HoneyComb LX2K by SolidRun, however this won’t really be usable in a laptop. Same goes for other alternative architectures, for example, there are the Talos II and Blackbird mainboards by Raptor Systems, which use POWER9 CPUs. While certainly supporting enough RAM, and also an interesting platform for something like Whonix, they’re not usable as a laptop.