[Arm-dev] (no subject)

[Jeffrey Walton]

>> Related, the Lemaker Hikey dev board is a nice alternative for
>> AMRv8/AARCH64. Its less than 1/4 of the price at $128 USD.
>> http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CNZ9GIQ.
>>
>> 2GB RAM and 8GB eMMC makes it very amicable to development. I use it
>> for testing OpenSSL and Crypto++ on real hardware.
>
> Having an ARMv8 with 2GB of RAM strikes me a bit like putting
> rocket engines on a bicycle. What's the use-case for using
> aarch64 with such tiny RAM where a 32-bit ARM will not do
> every bit as well? The key selling point of the Gigabyte
> board is that it'll take 128GB of standard ECC DIMMs. It is
> the first (and thus far only AFAICT) mass available
> standards-conforming ARM board that breaks out of the
> toy-server category.

In my use case, for OpenSSL and Crypto++, its about development and
validation testing for the architecture. For us, 128 GB of RAM is
overkill (though I would not turn it down).

The real hardware gets us out of Debian QEMU/Chroot's. We've had a few
issues with the hand crafted assembly. We could not debug it because
GDB was broken in the chroot. Moving to real hardware allowed us to
debug the issues. We've also had troubles with -O3 and vectorization
that seems to become more prevalent on real hardware.

I'm also told the multimedia stuff runs a little faster under ARMv8
because of the register width and vectorization, but I generally don't
use those features.

ARM64 is currently a mild pain point for the beta-1 release of OpenSSL
1.1.0, and its directly because of the testing on that Hikey. See, for
example, http://rt.openssl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=4406&user=guest&pass=guest
and https://rt.openssl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=4237&user=guest&pass=guest.

In short, the processes and testing ensures folks like you don't have
any troubles when you use the libraries on real servers :)

Jeff