On Sat, Mar 21, 2015 at 12:14:17AM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
1. 'Get a Raspberry Pi model B.' (This was before the current 2 model B.)
Me: 'Um, 512kB? Nothing better than microSD and USB2? No eSATA/SATA/mSATA. Really?'
funnily enough, i have a similar reaction to most intel motherboards - their CPUs can be quite good, but the PCIe lines available and the I/O is minimal compared to AMD AM2/3/3+ CPUs and motherboards. like 4 sata ports on intel vs 8 or 10 on amd, 2 or 3 pcie slots (at x16,x1,x1 or something like that) compared to about 4 or 5 or more on amd (at x16,x16,x16,x4,x1 or or x16,x8,x8,x1 or similar). and often only two DIMM sockets. to get the same sort of features (like ECC RAM on AM3+ m/bs) and I/O capability that AMD has on cheap consumer chips and boards, you have to spend a fortune on intel server cpus and motherboards.
And in the process of researching, I found disconcerting facts about Linux on ARM, and read Nathan Willis's LWN.net write-up about Stephen Arnold's SCALE talk, which reinforced that: https://lwn.net/Articles/635289/
yep, i've done similar research on ARM devices and come to the same conclusions as you for pretty much the same reasons. ARM sounds nice until you look at it in detail and notice the limitations and just how much hassle working with the damn things would be.
o Every bloody ARM device requires out-of-tree kernel patches [...]
true even for consumer devices like tablets, let alone devices intended to be servers or general purpose "computers". my first android tablet was an allwinner a10 based cheapie. very good specs for the day, and only about $100. keeping it updated was a major PITA, especially after all the android devs lost interest and moved on to newer, shinier hardware. i've still got it and it still works, but i bought a nexus 7 to replace it - by the time cyanogenmod etc drop support for it, it will be years obsolete.
o Every bloody ARM device binary-only, proprietary BLOBs if you care about X11 (obviously not router-only devices, etc.). Open source X11, if available, is usually quite old and worsens the kernel problem.
and it's not just X11. the arm distros are tiny compared to the full range of software in x86 debian, so you'll be spending a lot of time compiling if you need much of that. and then you'll find that the same sort of devs who think it's OK to write linux-only *nix software also think it's OK to write x86-only code. so you wont just be compiling, you'll be spending a lot of time fixing architecture-specific bugs and incompatibilities (which is, of course, part of the reason why the arm distros are tiny. if the source packages compiled OK, distro autobuilders would build them all)
I kept searching, and thought, 'What possibilities beckon if I relax the requirement for ultra-thrifty mains use by 10W or so?' Which was exactly when I discovered the portion of the SFF (small form factor) PC market AMD has rightfully owned for the last few years with amazingly powerful, amazingly power-thrifty, quiet SoCs on tiny mini-ITX motherboards in quiet, small cases. And 32GB RAM limits. And great open source everything with bog-standard x86_64 distros.
note that, unlike the AM3 etc m/bs, FM2/FM2+ does not support ECC RAM so may not be the best choice for, e.g, a NAS server. depends on how much risk you're willing to take (fairly low for non-ECC with properly memtested/burned-in DIMMS) and how much you're willing to spend up-front and in electricity bills to eliminate that risk. personally, i don't bother with ECC RAM at home - but that's only because it's harder to get. i can't just walk in to any computer shop and buy it, you can only get it from shops specialising in corporate sales (i.e. expensive) and from online stores. the price difference on ECC vs non-ECC is only about 30% these days. other than that minor detail, the boards and cpus you linked to sounded ideal for a home server.
But the hardware category is called HTPC (home theatre PC), because
heh, my mythtv backend is an fx-8150 because that's what i happened to have lying around when i built it. i bought it to upgrade my main system but never got around to installing it. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>