[Arm-dev] (no subject)

Fri Mar 11 15:00:13 UTC 2016
Karanbir Singh <kbsingh at centos.org>

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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.


- -- 
Karanbir Singh, Project Lead, The CentOS Project
+44-207-0999389 | http://www.centos.org/ | twitter.com/CentOS
GnuPG Key : http://www.karan.org/publickey.asc
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