[Arm-dev] (no subject)

Fri Mar 11 13:52:46 UTC 2016
Gordan Bobic <gordan at redsleeve.org>

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=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 :)

You make a most compelling argument. Thanks for this. :)

Gordan