arm64 as Tier 1 for FreeBSD 13

[Pete Wright]

On 12/3/19 7:12 AM, greg at unrelenting.technology wrote:
> December 3, 2019 1:57 PM, "Ed Maste" <emaste at freebsd.org> wrote:
>
>>> Developers should be able to build packages on commonly available,
>>> non-embedded Tier 1 systems. This can mean either native builds if
>>> non-embedded systems are commonly available for the platform in question,
>>> or it can mean cross-builds hosted on some other Tier 1 architecture.
>> This is somewhat of a challenge today - there aren't many arm64
>> platforms readily available in a configuration most suited to
>> developer use, such as a 4- or 8-core system with 16GB of RAM and
>> SATA- or NVMe-connected storage. Smaller systems (e.g. Pine64) are
>> readily available but not quite capable enough; larger systems (e.g.
>> Marvell ThunderX and Ampere eMAG) are out of reach for typical
>> developer use. User-mode QEMU cross-builds are a possibility, but this
>> item is one that should resolve over time as new platforms become
>> available.
> The Marvell/SolidRun MACCHIATObin is an affordable 4-core (Cortex A72)
> with DDR4 (takes one full size DIMM), SATA, USB 3.0 and PCIe.
> And most importantly, excellent firmware support (upstream EDK2+TrustedFirmware).
> The PCIe is rather quirky (I really should make a proper blog post already)
> but I have it working with a Radeon RX 480.
> It can be a decent developer desktop if you're fine with
> "2013 era ultrabook" levels of performance :D
>
> Though honestly if we're talking just about build machines, the RPi4 is also
> a 4xA72.. Of course the elephant in the room is the RAM :(
> But at least it has USB 3.0 for I/O, and we won't actually need to support PCIe:
> https://github.com/pftf/edk2-platforms/commit/f6469886e216390f460494b81a4a4bf78cb66ba8
>
> Also, nothing in "non-embedded systems" says "hardware you physically own", right?
> An EC2 a1.4xlarge (spot) instance is an excellent way to build big software.

interesting timing in regards to using AWS for builds:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/coming-soon-graviton2-powered-general-purpose-compute-optimized-memory-optimized-ec2-instances/

if these perf numbers are real, this is something i would be interested 
in for general purpose systems i deploy on AWS.

-p

-- 
Pete Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org
@nomadlogicLA