[Arm-dev] What's the best support hardware model ?

[Gordan Bobic]

On 2015-12-01 12:12, Karanbir Singh wrote:
> On 01/12/15 10:11, Andreas Reschke wrote:
>> Hi there,
>> I want to replace some servers (SOHO, Mail-, web-, Infrastructure,
>> X86_64, all with CentOS) with ARM-Servers. I've a /home-Server with
>> Odroid XU4 (Cloudshell) with Fedora running fine.
>> 
>> Are there other ARM-Devices running CentOS easy?
> 
> there are -no- ARMv7 grade server hardware available, there are single
> board units, none of which are capable of running infrastructure
> services for any reasonable performance. the cubietruck seems the most
> 'capable' but still falls well short of reasonable performance.
> 
> There are however ARMv8 based server's that are available, the APM
> Mustang class of boards are well supported in CentOS Linux 7 and are
> perhaps the most widely available.
> 
> this does however take into consideration my own interpretation of what
> might be considered 'reasonable performance'.

ARMv7 server grade hardware does exist. It wasn't so long ago that
I was helping the guys at Boston get RedSleeve 6 getting up and
running on their Viridis servers:

https://www.boston.co.uk/solutions/viridis/default.aspx

The biggest limitation with 32-bit ARM hardware isn't the CPU
performance but the 4GB RAM limit, and the vast majority of
devices comes with far, far less than 4GB; 512MB-1GB is much
more typical. If your workload fits within that memory envelope,
I find the performance isn't too bad for a variety of workloads.

Gordan