On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 11:30:46AM +1100, Toby Corkindale wrote:
I really like the little ARM single-board computers. I just wish the distros would manage to sort the hardware support out properly, and then continue to support previous versions for just a bit longer.
does debian on ARM have long term support? I suspect when the 64bit ARM chips come out then RedHat/CentOS will support them and we'll get long term support. I doubt they will bother until we're out of the 32bit ARM era - 2G of ram for 4 or 8 cores to share (even if they are slow) is very limiting. IIRC debian has had an aarm64 port since the start of this year. Ubuntu seems to have gone the other way - chasing the phone and tablet markets (which outside the big two is increasingly cluttered - firefox OS, tizen, jolla/sailfish, aosp respins, 'doze, ubuntu touch, ??), but I guess that doesn't preclude them doing a LTS ARM server spin too.
It's your typical case that a new version comes out, and then all the dev focus moves to it and the older version is stuck in time. Usually not too hard to bring it up to date if you know what you're doing, but it's a barrier to adoption for people who just want to have a small, stable platform, rather than spend all their time maintaining the platform.
or if you "install once and forget" then it limits their usefulness to being intranet only. can't have world-facing un-updated boxen...
Most of the boards sit a fair bit behind the current ARM tech, sadly. Eg. The common boards are a single or dual core 1GHz ARM A8 or A7. (And the raspberry pi is far behind that in terms of processing power)
Meanwhile the ARM cpu in the Nexus 5 phone can get up to 2.3 GHz on four cores! I'd love to have that sitting in a cheap, low-powered server the size of a deck of cards.. (You can get Snapdragon dev kits, but they're expensive and aimed at developing for new devices, not just running as mini computers)
generally agree, but cpu specs aren't everything. cache and main memory bandwidth, being able to run 2xSATA and 1gige NIC at full speed (handling interrupts & DMA efficiently), some PCIe, etc. are probably way more important to servers than a bit more cpu GHz. AFAICT ARM hardware/kernels still have some way to go to catch up in these areas. also if the SMP architecture is poor then sometimes adding more cores to a chip results in more contention and each core goes noticeably slower. I'm not clear what the state of SMP scalability is like on the myriad of ARM chip designs. cheers, robin