On 18 Sep 2016, at 18:55, Jeffrey Walton <noloader@gmail.com> wrote:
There are four small ARMv8 dev-boards I am aware. I have all of them
for testing software. They are:
* LeMaker HiKey (Aarch64, ASIMD, CRC, Crypto)
* Pine64 (Aarch64, ASIMD, CRC, Crypto)
* ODROID-C2 (Aarch64, ASIMD, CRC)
* Raspberry Pi-3 (Armhf (not even Aarch32))
Good summary, thanks.
I would avoid the RPI3. Its in a crummy configuration, and mine died
after about 2 weeks.
That’s a shocker. I will strike the RPi from my list of possibles - seems a shame. I wonder how durable the others are.
What I want to do here is find out if these are useful for offloading simple services - maybe one per board. I don’t know the advantages of a set of small, physically discrete, devices running a set of services, and I’d like to find out. I know they’d be a trainwreck for a customer-facing dynamically generated website. But what about NTP? True randomness maybe? How would they handle generating Kerberos tickets, or providing service discovery? Does XEN slow them down to a crawl? Can they generate synthetic load, and monitor the results? No idea.
I may be barking up the wrong tree here. If UEFI is the way forward, I don’t imagine a distro-maintained kernel package will ever be supplied for any of these consumer-size boards. So there’s no avoiding u-boot tinkering, /boot/ copying or kernel compiling when dealing with consumer boards like these. Does that sound right?
At the higher end, there are two servers I am aware. I believe the
Applied Micro X-gene is the Mustang board.
* Mustang board (early ones lack CRC and Crypto)
* Overdrive 1000 (AMD ARMv8 processor)
I searched for the Gigabyte MP30-AR0 after Gordan described it. It’s not right for my pet project here, but I can see the appeal for the day job. And if this 32 core X-Gene3 appears, maybe that will be a lot of bang for your buck.
The Overdrive never arrived (more
correctly, it never shipped), and I'm trying to get a refund on the
purchase.
Sorry to hear that. Sounds like there are more of these bigger boards on the way - Lenovator Cello maybe?
I don’t know about Cavium, and AMD's Seattle chipsets.
Thanks for the help. I am enlightened.
Nick