forestj

I have been self-hosting my blog (ghost), git server (gogs), and a few other small things for years: https://sequentialread.com/.  I'm not using an SBC for it, rather a very old dell desktop, but I think the principle is the same. I use docker-compose to run the apps on my server.  I worked as a DevOps engineer for a couple years so I am intimately familiar with docker and linux containers in general.   So to me, setting up containers and what not (anything which is done inside the OS of the server) is the super duper easy part, its highly automatable, it can all be defined with code, like with ansible for example. 

I think there are 2 main pain points for self hosting, both of which don't really have any great solutions out there on the world wild web:
 Configuring your router is a pain in the butt, especially for non-technical people & may not be possible for many users.  If you want to use your self-hosted services for something "mission critical" like email, you probably are going to want monitoring, observability, automated failover, etc.  These things are really complex and hard to set up, there's no "ez mode" button or framework that one can use, especially not anything designed for self-hosting. I actually started a project to try to address those pain points, starting with #1.  I wrote a bit about it years ago here: https://sequentialread.com/pragmatic-path-towards-non-technical-users-owning-their-own-data/
I also decided to try to coin a term to describe what I'm trying to create, a "personal datacenter", basically like a personal computer, but instead of having a screen, keyboard, and mouse, it's a web server or group of web servers that are accessible on the public internet, and one can easily run various "apps" on these servers to make a blog, email server, online store, git server, etc.   I know  there are already other projects out there like nextcloud, freedombox, yunohost, etc, but I don't think any of those projects really address the hard pain points of self hosting, the network routing setup & failover.   I don't wanna go too much in depth with my project here, I'll probably make my own thread about it at some point. I don't quite have enough done to show it off properly yet
 

Hi,  I was just in the armbian matrix channel asking about FLOSS SBCs, SBCs which can be booted / operated without blobs or with as few blobs as possible.

I am not one of those purist Stallmanite zealots who refuse to touch anything which i deem imperfect in the freedom department. Instead I am just trying to be practical and figure out whats the best options for SBCs which respect users. SBCs whose security/integrity is verifiable and doesn't hinge on appeals to authority, like "just trust our secret sauce, it will be fine".

I want to know about any projects from the past, things that are in progress, and hear experiences from folks who are interested in open source firmware, bootloaders, etc.  I got the general idea from talking in the matrix channel that there are actually more FLOSS-friendly SBCs than a cursory google search might indicate, and I would like to discuss and put together a list.  Goal would be that this can perhaps be published somewhere, I'm not sure where would be the appropriate place on the Armbian documentation or web site, but I can also publish it myself and try to keep it up to date as this is something I'm keenly interested in.

So, without further adieu, I will start, these are the projects I know about which I'm interested in:

Bootloader software projects:
https://libreboot.org/
https://www.coreboot.org/

It's not an SBC, but there is this project to have an open source bootloader/firmware linux laptop based on this chrome book: Asus c201 with RK3288
https://github.com/SolidHal/PrawnOS

This old open source hardware board I believe can be run with open source firmware but its quite slow and less than 1 GB RAM
https://www.olimex.com/wiki/A10-OLinuXino-LIME

Someone from matrix said that the ROC-RK3399-PC (http://en.t-firefly.com/product/rocrk3399pc) can be run without blobs:
 

Please let me know about any other open source firmware/bootloader for SBC projects that you know about!!