On 2016-09-18 09:46, Nick Hardiman wrote: > Which 64 bit consumer-size board is the easiest to work with now? > > I want to buy a few small ARMv8 boards to run CentOS on. Seems like a > reasonable idea to offload simple services onto simple boards. Is this > page still accurate? > https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/AltArch/AArch64 > > I don’t really know why 64 bits gets all the attention at this small > scale, but that does seem to be where people are headed. > I’ve tried a few 32 bit boards, and it is fiddly work. I end up > spending more time on the bootloader and kernel compilation and less > time at the application level. > > AFAICT, progress is being made getting Odroid C2 support into the > kernel. Not so sure about Hikey and RPi3. Looks like Redhat is working > with Applied Micro X-gene - I guess that's for the data center market. > > Any suggestions? AFAIK the only boards that will be officially supported will be ones that support UEFI. I'm sure many others will have images made available for them by the community. Personally, I use a Gigabyte MP30-AR0 (Note: AR1 is the same board as the AR0 but with UEFI firmware. You can flash the firmware back and forth as you want, and you can chain load UEFI firmware from u-boot (that is what I do). You can put up to 128GB of RAM into that and with 8 rather performant cores you can probably run whatever you want to compartmentalize in containers (or VMs if you don't mind the performance hit that goes with it). The only downside of the Gigabyte MP30 is that the board costs about £500 (not including RAM, it takes ECC DDR3 UDIMMs/RDIMMs). Gordan