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