On 12/04/2016 09:27 AM, Nick Hardiman wrote:
I was on the verge of buying a couple small SBCs back in September, to
install CentOS on. But then I stopped to concentrate on my RHCE exam.
Now I’m trying to pick up where I left off.

I remember Uli Middleburg said Odroid C2 was not far off having all
device drivers in the mainline kernel.

How’s kernel support for the LeMaker HiKey? Have things moved on since
Jim Perrin wrote these build instructions?
https://people.centos.org/jperrin/hikey/ReadMe.txt

On 19 Sep 2016, at 18:25, Nick Hardiman <nick@internetmachines.co.uk
<mailto:nick@internetmachines.co.uk>> wrote:

On 18 Sep 2016, at 18:55, Jeffrey Walton <noloader@gmail.com
<mailto: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

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Jim Perrin
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twitter: @BitIntegrity | GPG Key: FA09AD77
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