Xen Project officially ports its hypervisor to Raspberry Pi 4

RPi4 is interesting because it's the first Raspberry Pi with a serious amount of RAM (8GB), moderate speed CPUs (4 x Cortex A72), that can boot and run from external USB 3 SSDs, with UAS and UEFI+ACPI. Essentially you can now use them for aarch64 server SBSA/SBBR development.

It's about a third of the speed of my Intel i7 laptop from 18 months ago, which considering the incredibly low price I consider to be fantastic.

I recently got Fedora Server installed on one using Robert Grimm's instructions (linked from my blog along with other useful links here: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2020/09/24/raspberry-pi-4-running...)

Re: Xen Project officially ports its hypervisor to Raspberry Pi 4

#6

Post by rwmj » Tue, Sep 29, 2020, 3:42 PM UTC

nikisweeting wrote: post #4

Did ESXi on Raspi ever materialize? I remember seeing rumors about it being in the works last year.

There was another VMware demo recently. https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/24/vmworld_preview_esxi_...

Re: Xen Project officially ports its hypervisor to Raspberry Pi 4

#7

Post by kristopolous » Tue, Sep 29, 2020, 4:03 PM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #5

RPi4 is interesting because it's the first Raspberry Pi with a serious amount of RAM (8GB), moderate speed CPUs (4 x Cortex A72), that can boot and run from external USB 3 SSDs, with UAS and UEFI+ACPI. Essentially you can now use them for aarch64 server SBSA/SBBR development. It's about a third of the speed of my Intel i7 laptop from 18 months ago, which considering the incredibly low price I consider to be fantastic…

Are you running a 64 bit kernel actually? Which distribution?

I found I could either get a 64 bit kernel (lots of things) Or decent hardware support (raspbian) but not both.

Re: Xen Project officially ports its hypervisor to Raspberry Pi 4

#8

Post by bullen » Tue, Sep 29, 2020, 4:09 PM UTC

Per watt, Raspberry 4 is probably peak CPU of our civilization. But 64-bit is only viable if you buy the twice as expensive 8GB model and have use for the extra bandwidth.

I'm building hybrid clusters of 4 (2GB) & 2 (the older version) on 32-bit so I can run my PaaS at record flops/W/$:

https://github.com/tinspin/rupy

Re: Xen Project officially ports its hypervisor to Raspberry Pi 4

#9

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Tue, Sep 29, 2020, 4:10 PM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #5

RPi4 is interesting because it's the first Raspberry Pi with a serious amount of RAM (8GB), moderate speed CPUs (4 x Cortex A72), that can boot and run from external USB 3 SSDs, with UAS and UEFI+ACPI. Essentially you can now use them for aarch64 server SBSA/SBBR development. It's about a third of the speed of my Intel i7 laptop from 18 months ago, which considering the incredibly low price I consider to be fantastic…

Oh, that's excellent. The same group doing the RPi4 UEFI stuff also does a version for the Pi 3: https://github.com/pftf/RPi3

Re: Xen Project officially ports its hypervisor to Raspberry Pi 4

#10

Post by iMerNibor » Tue, Sep 29, 2020, 4:11 PM UTC

kristopolous wrote: post #7

rwmj wrote: post #5

RPi4 is interesting because it's the first Raspberry Pi with a serious amount of RAM (8GB), moderate speed CPUs (4 x Cortex A72), that can boot and run from external USB 3 SSDs, with UAS and UEFI+ACPI. Essentially you can now use them for aarch64 server SBSA/SBBR development. It's about a third of the speed of my Intel i7 laptop from 18 months ago, which considering the incredibly low price I consider to be fantastic…

Are you running a 64 bit kernel actually? Which distribution? I found I could either get a 64 bit kernel (lots of things) Or decent hardware support (raspbian) but not both.

There is now beta (?) builds of a 64bit raspberry pi os (formerly known as raspbian) available: https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspios_arm64/images/

Not sure how well it works, but it is a thing now