Running Open Source Software on ESPRESSObin

The Marvell ESPRESSObin board project, launched by Globalscale Technologies on Kickstarter at the beginning of October this year, is a single board computing platform which places emphasis on networking, storage and wireless connectivity. The board is powered by Marvell’s ARMADA 3700 dual-core processor clocking up to 1.2 GHz. Other specs include:

• 1x Topaz Networking Switch
• 1x uSD card slot with footprint for an optional 4GB EMMC
• 1GB DDR3 & 2GB DDR3 options
• 2x Gb Ethernet LAN
• 1x Ethernet WAN
• 1x SATA interface for HDD storage
• 1x USB 3.0 and 1x USB 2.0
• 1x MiniPCIe for Wireless/BLE peripherals
• 2x Row of GPIO headers for accessories and shields

All of ESPRESSObin’s software is Open Source, and users have a choice of compiling system components themselves or downloading pre-compiled binaries. Considering supported file systems, currently users can boot Buildroot, Ubuntu and Yocto on their boards, with support soon to be added for OpenWrt, Debian
and Archlinux ARM.

In line with an Open Source approach, the ESPRESSObin board is perfectly suited for running Open Source Software. So far, the ESPRESSObin wiki features tutorials for libyang – a popular YANG data modelling language parser and toolkit written in C (used in projects such as libnetconf2, Netopeer2 or Sysrepo), MySQL – a renowned, fast, multi-user and multi-threaded SQL database server and OpenSSL – a robust, commercial-grade, and full-featured toolkit for the Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocols.. Additional Open Source Software tutorials are in the making at the time of writing this blog post.

Furthermore, the OpenSSL tutorial also features a speed test in order to demonstrate how well ESPRESSObin, or to put it differently, how well its 64bit Dual Core ARM53 Armada 3700 SoC (clocking up to 1.2 GHz) fares with executing machine code.

Read more on respective wiki pages listed below:

• libyang
• MySQL
• OpenSSL