On 05/03/16 12:27, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 05, 2016 at 12:14:54PM +0000, Gordan Bobic wrote:
>> On 05/03/16 12:00, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>>> On Sat, Mar 05, 2016 at 11:57:11AM +0000, Gordan Bobic wrote:
>>>> On 05/03/16 11:22, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>>>>> I wanted to permanently get rid of u-boot because I want to see if we
>>>>> can turn these boards into real (SBSA/SBBR) server hardware that can
>>>>> run RHEL.
>>>>
>>>> Would putting UEFI image for chainloading onto the SD card not
>>>> fulfill this requirement without the loss of flexibility incurred by
>>>> losing the 1st stage u-boot loader?
>>>
>>> I'd really just like SBSA hardware without complications. If we can
>>> get that I'll purchase dozens of these boards for OpenStack
>>> development. If not, I'll be recommending Huskyboards :-)
>>
>> From what little I can find on the spec, it really doesn't look like
>> the Huskyboard is anywhere nowhere even near the same league as the
>> Gigabyte board. Not standard *TX form factor, one DIMM slot on the
>> underside of the board, IIRC, non-standard power input connector.
>> It's as awful a hack-job as most of the ARM dev kits.
>
> "hack-job" is a bit severe. The Huskyboard is a development board,
> not a server board. It has two SO-DIMM slots, so I guess it should
> take 8 or 16 GB of laptop memory, which is fine for our development
> needs. Not something you'd want in a production server of course.
The point being that you are comparing a dev board to a server board.
It's a bit like comparing the Taj Mahal in India to Taj Mahal the indian
restaurant.
> It will also have SBSA out of the box, so it'll just run RHEL (and,
> one day, Windows). It has a nicer processor - the AMD Seattle.
Just out of interest, what is better about the AMD Seattle CPU compared
to the X-Gene on the Gigabyte board?
> It's also half the price of the Gigabyte.
It's all relative. Half the price of the Gigabyte is still outrageously
expensive for what it is. At least with the Gigabyte you can argue that
to put together an equivalent Xeon system would cost you at least as much.
>> OTOH, the MP30-AR0 is standard Micro-ATX in every way, and can take
>> up to 128GB of RAM (it's a bit surreal of amazing to suddenly go
>> from bashing my head against the limits of tiny memory on ARM bords
>> to one that I can just fill up with 128GB of RAM I have lying
>> around!).
>
> Believe me, I'm appreciating the 32 GB in this Gigabyte board, and may
> upgrade it to 64 GB. Previously I had only 16 GB in any ARM system
> (Mustang) which is usable, but a bit tight when you're doing lots of
> virt.
My main motivation for this is for a build farm machine. Rebuilding a
whole distro even on something like a Chromebook 2 takes forever. Not to
mention the pain when the original release of my distro was built on a
few {Sheeva|Dream}Plugs. In 128GB of RAM I could just have the whole
mock build process go 8-at-a-time with /var/lib/mock on tmpfs and still
manage to build LibreOffice.
Gordan