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Xen Project officially ports its hypervisor to Raspberry Pi 4

theregister.com

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

#11

Post by coder543 »

bullen wrote: post #8

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

> But 64-bit is only viable if you buy the twice as expensive 8GB model and have use for the extra bandwidth.

Benchmarks don't entirely agree: https://www.cnx-software.com/2016/03/01/64-bit-arm-aarch64-i...

If the difference between AArch64 and AArch32 were simply larger pointers, I would probably agree, but AArch64 includes a number of instructions that can do more work, so 64-bit programs can actually run faster than their 32-bit equivalents, even if you're not using much RAM.

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

#12

Post by rwmj »

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.

Of course. The real problem is not the 64 bit kernel which you can easily get with Raspbian, but the 64 bit userspace for which you currently need a different distribution (but see sister comment). I'm using Fedora 33 Server.

  $ uname -a
  Linux rpi4.home.annexia.org 5.8.11-300.fc33.aarch64 #1 SMP Wed Sep 23 13:51:39 UTC 2020 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux
Everything I care about except Wifi is currently supported.

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

#13

Post by [deleted] »

bullen wrote: post #8

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

[deleted]

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

#15

Post by rwmj »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #9
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

AIUI there are problems with that fact that the RPi3 doesn't have a "proper" GIC. The RPI4 has GICv2, but RPi3 has some sort of custom interrupt controller.

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

#16

Post by my123 »

bullen wrote: post #8

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

Per watt, it's not even close. That's because RPis are a lot behind on manufacturing processes, with newer designs being more efficient too. (RPi4 is on 28nm)

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

#18

Post by als0 »

coder543 wrote: post #11
bullen wrote: post #8

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

> But 64-bit is only viable if you buy the twice as expensive 8GB model and have use for the extra bandwidth. Benchmarks don't entirely agree: https://www.cnx-software.com/2016/03/01/64-bit-arm-aarch64-i... If the difference between AArch64 and AArch32 were simply larger pointers, I would probably agree, but AArch64 includes a number of instructions that can do more work, so 64-bit programs can actually run faster th…

AArch64 also has a larger number of registers, which can make a big difference for workloads.

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

#19

Post by pjmlp »

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…

Actually I am more impressed with the ESP32, given how much powerful it is than what we had at the high school computer club.

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

#20

Post by didip »

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.

With the latest Raspbian, you can always turn on the 64 bit kernel by modifying config.txt inside boot image and add: arm_64bit=1

My homelab is Kubernetes running on Raspberry Pi 4 with aarm64 architecture. So far, it works great.

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