[MirageOS-devel] Hardware choices for ARM64

[Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I sent Richard Jones a ping to find out about availability of ARM64 hardware,
and he sent back a very useful list of options below.  Justin also points out 
that Hetzner do hosting (with serial) of various ARM32 hardware.
  https://www.hetzner.de/it/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver

I'll look at ordering the APM Mustang X-Gene 1 that Richard references below.  
Drop me a line if you'd like to have serial access to it or an account.

-anil

Begin forwarded message:
> 
> From: "Richard W.M. Jones" <rich@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: 9 November 2015 at 11:33:22 GMT
> To: Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: Xavier Leroy <Xavier.Leroy@xxxxxxxx>
> Subject: Re: Fwd: [MirageOS-devel] Fwd: [Minios-devel] Mini-OS on ARM64
> 
> On Mon, Nov 09, 2015 at 11:16:02AM +0000, Anil Madhavapeddy wrote:
>> Dear Xavier, Richard,
> 
>> It looks like an ARM64 unikernel build for MirageOS is pretty
>> straightforward now, but we're struggling with finding hardware.  Did
>> you both develop and test the native code support in OCaml with
>> emulators?  Any pointers to good dev boards would be appreciated if
>> you happened to use them.
> 
> I used the APM Mustang X-Gene 1.  These are available for around $3K
> each IIRC.  They are great machines, lots of RAM (16 or 32GB), 8
> cores, UEFI, ACPI, PCI-x, working hardware virtualization, works out
> of the box with upstream Linux.
> https://www.apm.com/products/data-center/x-gene-family/x-c1-development-kits/
> 
> There are not many good development boards available otherwise.
> The current choices are:
> 
> - Wait 2-3 months for the 96boards EE
>   (https://www.96boards.org/products/ee/)  This is functionally
>   equivalent to the Mustang, and will cost under $500.  However
>   it's been in development hell for a year.
> 
> - 96boards Dragonboard or HiKey.  I've had a Dragonboard on order
>   since August, and still not received it.  Main problem with this is
>   lack of RAM (2GB), and nonstandard u-boot/kernel crap.
> 
> - Chroot on your Android phone, eg. LG G4
>   
> (https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2015/09/24/fedora-22-chrooted-on-an-lg-g4-phone/)
>   Actually a better dev platform than the Dragonboard, but you
>   can't run any kernel code, nor use virtualization, so it
>   probably rules itself out for what you want to do.
> 
> - Various enterprise hardware like the HP Moonshot, AMD Seattle, or
>   Cavium.  We have a bunch of these systems for free, but I imagine
>   if you had to buy them they'd be extremely expensive.
> 
> - qemu-system-aarch64: Slow, as you've probably found out already.
> 
> Expect to see a lot more hardware available in 2016.
> 
> HTH,
> 
> Rich.
> 
> -- 
> Richard Jones
> Red Hat
> 


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