[Arm-dev] (no subject)

[Gordan Bobic]

On 2016-03-11 15:00, Karanbir Singh wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> On 11/03/16 13:52, Gordan Bobic wrote:
>> On 2016-03-11 13:47, Jeffrey Walton wrote:
>>>>> 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=gue
> st
>>> 
>>> 
> and
>>> https://rt.openssl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=4237&user=guest&pass=gu
> est.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
> In short, the processes and testing ensures folks like you don't have
>>> any troubles when you use the libraries on real servers :)
>> 
>> You make a most compelling argument. Thanks for this. :)
> 
> 
> the other thing is - some level of standards... and enablement, docker
> and k8s on aarch64 is consistent across the entire armserver markets.

Sort of. Maybe. See previous discussion on this thread about page
sizes.