[Arm-dev] supported 64bit hardware

[Nick Hardiman]

> On 18 Sep 2016, at 18:55, Jeffrey Walton <noloader at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> There are four small ARMv8 dev-boards I am aware. I have all of them
> for testing software. They are:
> 
> * LeMaker HiKey (Aarch64, ASIMD, CRC, Crypto)
> * Pine64 (Aarch64, ASIMD, CRC, Crypto)
> * ODROID-C2 (Aarch64, ASIMD, CRC)
> * Raspberry Pi-3 (Armhf (not even Aarch32))

Good summary, thanks.

> I would avoid the RPI3. Its in a crummy configuration, and mine died
> after about 2 weeks.

That’s a shocker. I will strike the RPi from my list of possibles - seems a shame. I wonder how durable the others are.

What I want to do here is find out if these are useful for offloading simple services - maybe one per board. I don’t know the advantages of a set of small, physically discrete, devices running a set of services, and I’d like to find out. I know they’d be a trainwreck for a customer-facing dynamically generated website. But what about NTP? True randomness maybe? How would they handle generating Kerberos tickets, or providing service discovery? Does XEN slow them down to a crawl? Can they generate synthetic load, and monitor the results? No idea.

I may be barking up the wrong tree here. If UEFI is the way forward, I don’t imagine a distro-maintained kernel package will ever be supplied for any of these consumer-size boards. So there’s no avoiding u-boot tinkering, /boot/ copying or kernel compiling when dealing with consumer boards like these. Does that sound right?

> At the higher end, there are two servers I am aware. I believe the
> Applied Micro X-gene is the Mustang board.
> 
> * Mustang board (early ones lack CRC and Crypto)
> * Overdrive 1000 (AMD ARMv8 processor)

I searched for the Gigabyte MP30-AR0 after Gordan described it. It’s not right for my pet project here, but I can see the appeal for the day job. And if this 32 core X-Gene3 appears, maybe that will be a lot of bang for your buck.

> The Overdrive never arrived (more
> correctly, it never shipped), and I'm trying to get a refund on the
> purchase.

Sorry to hear that. Sounds like there are more of these bigger boards on the way - Lenovator Cello maybe?

I don’t know about Cavium, and AMD's Seattle chipsets.

Thanks for the help. I am enlightened.
Nick

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