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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

#21

Post by retrac »

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.

I run Arch Linux ARM with the 64 bit kernel and userspace on my Raspberry Pi 3 for tinkering.

GPIO, Wifi, Ethernet, framebuffer HDMI, USB all work fine.

Video acceleration was the last hardware not supported in 64 bit land, and recent kernels finally have some experimental support. I haven't tried it myself though.

Raspbian itself has a beta 64 bit for kernel for a few months now.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/latest-raspberry-pi-os-upda...

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

#22

Post by _kp6z »

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

Apple has had the performance per watt crown for quite some time. These chips are not very good for anything outside of prototyping, otherwise hyperscalers would run a sea of small nodes.

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

#23

Post by elheffe80 »

didip wrote: post #20
kristopolous wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> My homelab is Kubernetes running on Raspberry Pi 4

Honest question- do you just run one RPi4 or do you have multiple? Either way- how much ram do you have and do you find you use it all/wish you had more?

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

#25

Post by genpfault »

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

> if you buy the twice as expensive 8GB model and have use for the extra bandwidth.

Are you seeing increased memory bandwidth on the 8GB version vs. the 1GB/2GB/4GB ones?

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

#26

Post by ncmncm »

pjmlp wrote: post #19
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.

ESP32 is fun, but its low-power states and transitions are said to be messed up, so not as useful as e.g. STM32 for battery-powered projects.

I have no first-hand knowledge, but would welcome reports from anyone who does.

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

#27

Post by ncmncm »

vianpl wrote: post #2

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/alpine.DEB.2.21.2007101521290.4...

Is this a parallel effort? Or somebody who did it first? Or a snapshot of the work reported?

And, if one of the former, how did they solve the problems reported in the article?

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

#28

Post by mixmastamyk »

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.

I've found Ubuntu Mate even easier to use than raspbian, and now it finally supports the Pi4:

https://ubuntu-mate.org/download/arm64/

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

#29

Post by rhatr »

One of the guys behind this hack here. The other is Stefano (and most credit goes to him actually). Would love for everyone to give it a try and help us improve it. I'm working on a few ready-made VMs that you can easily deploy on Raspberry Pi 4 with Project EVE (including Windows 10 VM and Plan9 VM). If you're interested -- drop me a note (I may even be able to do a few bounties/etc. for things we need to improve ASAP). Otherwise -- feel free to ask questions, etc. in this thread. It looks small -- but the whole thing took us a month or so (not full time of course) so there's quite a bit of subtlety there.

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

#30

Post by rhatr »

Btw, I just cut EVE release 5.12.3-rpi-xen-arm64 (there's also 5.12.3-rpi-kvm-arm64 of course -- but this is Xen thread ;-))) that fixes a few issues that were reported ever since we got slashdotted this morning. This is your best bet in trying Xen/EVE/RPi4 combo. E.g. docker run lfedge/eve:5.12.3-rpi-xen-arm64 live > live.raw is literally all you need to get going.
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