[Arm-dev] hikey 960?

Thu Oct 25 23:27:39 UTC 2018
Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org>

On 10/25/2018 05:57 PM, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
> 
> 
> On 10/25/18 6:30 PM, Johnny Hughes wrote:
>>
>> One thing to keep in mind is our armhfp distro is designed for the hobby
>> type boards .. BUT our aarch64 distro is designed to run on large 64bit
>> UEFI arm servers, but hobby boards that don't follow the UEFI standard
>> and have limited RAM (that board as 3GB), etc.
> 
> In the for-what-it-is-worth column,,,,
> 
> I am beginning to see that at least the odroid HC1 is targeted beyond 
> the hobby board.
> 
> And Itron has a board that they market to partners for smartgrid
> applications.
> 
> https://www.itron.com/na/partners/developer/products/boards
> 
> But I dropped working with my colleagues at Itron over a year ago.
> 
> 


Let me be more clear .. I am not using the word hobby to mean anything
negative.  I could have also used embedded or non server or any number
of terms.

Those boards have lots of uses (in cars for driving their video screens
and bluetooth interfaces, embedded in several industrial systems, use on
ships and planes to do things on the electronics systems, etc. They can
be very important.

But that is just not really the focus of what aarch64 from CentOS is ..
it is for big iron servers with many gigs if RAM and many cores and
UEFI, etc.

The uboot type boards are almost all one off designs with individually
unique components .. many of which are not supported in the mainline
kernel.  Many of the companies don't seem to understand Linux or the
kernel ecosystem, etc.  That is a generalization, of course .. but if a
company really wanted enterprise deployment, they would likely be using
UEFI.

If they aren't, then they are not really interested in CentOS or RHEL
being installed on their hardware.  1, 2, 3 GB ram is really not going
to cut it for many CentOS 64 bit installs.  I mean, in a stripped down
CLI environment you can do some things .. but if you want to use CentOS
GUI installs, that amount of RAM is going to struggle.  If you want to
do video processing, etc .. well, not really on CentOS with 3 GB ram
(right?).

Now, you might be able to use VNC (or some compressed variantof that) to
connect to a large server and get some graphical things done .. and
fairly minimal loaded CLI tasks would be fine.

Anyway .. we are certainly interested in getting all things arm working
.. especially on this list.  I just thought I'd be honest with you guys
about what the real 'designed purpose' of the 64bit tree.

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