I see the download page says there are USB 3 issues with the mainline kernel (and eMMC, which the board doesn't even have?) and serial console for legacy kernel is broken.

I've also read that HMP isn't supported on mainline either.

 

Which kernel is recommended for general mini server usage with an attached hard drive and the OS installed on the hard drive with SD only for boot?

I'm thinking of replacing my old cubietruck with it, running nginx as an SSL web proxy and a little bit of web serving.

Use next kernel, don't think about USB3 issues any more (that's a XU4 problem), don't expect serial console problems (that was an Armbian problem) and please overthink 'rootfs on HDD' (on SSD that's great, HDDs are too slow and you prevent them from sleeping when moving the rootfs on them).

 

@Igor: how are download pages generated (focus on preventing misleading/wrong infomation)?

4 hours ago, tkaiser said:

how are download pages generated (focus on preventing misleading/wrong infomation)?

 

Fixed. The logic goes this way. It's XU4 template with exceptions. I changed data while for the rest a small rfc was needed since known issues were per family. Now per family can also be overwritten. If you create a file odroidhc1.md in here, it will be presented as "known issues" at HC1 only. Currently, there is none.
https://github.com/armbian/documentation/tree/master/docs/known_issues

On 9/2/2017 at 10:47 AM, tkaiser said:

please overthink 'rootfs on HDD' (on SSD that's great, HDDs are too slow and you prevent them from sleeping when moving the rootfs on them).

 

I might just mount /var as the hard drive then. I bought the HC1 because I've got a bunch of 2.5" drives laying around after upgrading laptops with SSD's

I've had several uSD cards die over the years from too much writing.

5 hours ago, chrisf said:

I've had several uSD cards die over the years from too much writing.

 

Armbian has already a lot of optimisations regarding writings to SD card but you can go further with having virtual read-only system. Get Ubuntu with kernel 4.9, install overlayroot (from armbian-config) and add hard drive out of your read only section. Some memory will be used, which is not a problem on a board with 2G. And your SD card will live much much longer