On 12/23/2015 05:01 PM, Jeffrey Walton wrote: > I've been lurking for a while hoping to see someone call out some > specs, but I don't recall seeing them. My apologies in advance of this > is a redundant question. > > I'm interested in inexpensive hardware to test for arm64/aarch64, but > I'm having trouble finding them. Everyone is. It's not as widely available as I'd like yet. > > For example, [1] lists a X-C1 Basic dev board, but its $1495 USD [2] > (add $1000 USD for the Plus kit). Another example is the AMD Opteron > A1100 dev kit at $3000 USD [6]. As another example, I purchased both > an HTC 510 Desire and a Samsung Galaxy Core-Prime because both were > supposed to be 64-bit ARMv8 [3,4]. But after the press release and > conversion to the US market, they arrived as 32-bit ARMv7. > > First question... Does Cent maintain a list of inexpensive hardware > for testing? If so, would someone point me to it? I understand the > list is subjective and it will become stale over time. That's a > different problem (and a problem I wish I had). Not really. As the arm64 maintainer I can share the list of what I have for testing, and what I would recommend for cheap. What we build/test against currently: 1. APM mustang board, which you've already listed above. 2. AMD Seattle board, which you've also listed above. 3. Cavium ThunderX. These are mostly server platforms and aren't cheap for the home user. What I'd recommend: Keep an eye on 96boards.com. They have a Hikey, and will soon have a Huskey board which should work ootb. These are both far less expensive. Lenovator offers a Hikey with more ram and a larger emmc. It's roughly $100 (US). Gigabyte's MP30-AR0 board (based on APM's mustang) should work with CentOS OOTB as well, and will hopefully be reasonably priced. Soon I'll have a pine64 board as well. I'm hoping to be able to add that to the list of things we support. > Second question... Or, is it possible to get SSH access to one of the > machines provided by Applied Micro or AMD [1,6]? GNU has a compile > farm (http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/CompileFarm) I can test with, and I'm > wondering if Cent does the same. Sadly, no. We don't have enough to offer up ssh access. We will be adding an aarch64/arm64 box to the community build service though, so you would be able to build against the platform, but no direct ssh access. > Last question... Has anyone tried using the Android TV boxes [5] for > testing? They appear to be inexpensive (around $100 USD) and some > appear to be ARMv8 with multiple 64-bit cores (Cortex-A53 and > Cortex-A57). I haven't, but keep in mind not all ARM is created equal. We've built things up to target the server standards, SBBR and SBSA. The TL;DR there for most folks is "boots via UEFI". Lots of the lower end boxen like the Android TV are using uboot with custom kernel support, etc. This means that the userspace should work, but actually booting the box would be questionable, depending on if the vendor's done something funky with the kernel, uboot, etc. > > (Its definitely like Perrin said, "Hardware really is the best sort of > gift..." [6]). It absolutely is, and I'm hoping it becomes more generally available early in 2016. I'd love to have a larger community who can engage and participate. -- Jim Perrin The CentOS Project | http://www.centos.org twitter: @BitIntegrity | GPG Key: FA09AD77