Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Xen Project officially ports its hypervisor to Raspberry Pi 4

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–38 of 38 posts

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

#31

Post by m463 »

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 recently saw an article on setting up jitsi on a pi, and I thought it required 64-bit.

https://gist.github.com/krithin/e50a6001c8435e46cb85f5c6c78e...

I guess there's a 64-bit ubuntu 20.04 server

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

#32

Post by didip »

elheffe80 wrote: post #23
didip wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I have a cluster of 3 RPi4 each with 4GB RAM because it is super difficult to get the 8GB spec.

The more the better because it is difficult to run multiple dbs or queue systems right now.

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

#33

Post by mwcampbell »

ncmncm wrote: post #26
pjmlp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're interested in something low-power and not running a general-purpose OS like Linux, watch for the launch of the Precursor [1]. The main processor (RISC-V on an FPGA) seems to be more powerful than an ESP32, and they rejected the ESP32 for the WiFi component specifically because of the low-power state transition issues. The intended application is a stand-alone secure enclave complete with LCD, keyboard, and audio, but it will be interesting to see what hacks are developed for this hardware.

[1]: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor

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

#34

Post by ncmncm »

mwcampbell wrote: post #33
ncmncm wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're interested in something low-power and not running a general-purpose OS like Linux, watch for the launch of the Precursor [1]. The main processor (RISC-V on an FPGA) seems to be more powerful than an ESP32, and they rejected the ESP32 for the WiFi component specifically because of the low-power state transition issues. The intended application is a stand-alone secure enclave complete with LCD, keyboard, and…

Before I read about Precursor, I did not realize that FPGAs could be at the center of a low-power design.

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

#35

Post by exged »

ncmncm wrote: post #26
pjmlp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, the ESP32 uses a ton of power relative to most MCUs (external flash comes at a cost!) and has relatively poor peripherals, documentation and tooling. But it's cheap and not bad if you need WiFi or Bluetooth.

Most non-networked projects would probably be better served by one of the numerous Cortex-M microcontrollers out there.

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

#36

Post by mwcampbell »

ncmncm wrote: post #34
mwcampbell wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're interested in something low-power and not running a general-purpose OS like Linux, watch for the launch of the Precursor [1]. The main processor (RISC-V on an FPGA) seems to be more powerful than an ESP32, and they rejected the ESP32 for the WiFi component specifically because of the low-power state transition issues. The intended application is a stand-alone secure enclave complete with LCD, keyboard, and…

Before I read about Precursor, I did not realize that FPGAs could be at the center of a low-power design.

To be clear, it looks like they've had to compromise on power consumption versus performance in their FPGA-based prototype:

https://betrusted.io/betrusted-architecture/

They plan to move to a custom ASIC later:

https://betrusted.io/dev-plan/

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

#37

Post by StillBored »

iMerNibor wrote: post #10
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.

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

I'm not sure I understand what the purpose of the raspberry pi OS is anymore. In the past it was a pretty custom kernel, with a user environment stripped down to work with a minimal RAM configuration. Everyone put up with nonstandard SSH daemons/window managers/missing packages/etc because due to the constrained environment and the fact that arm wasn't a first class citizen with the likes of ubuntu/redhat/etc.

These days, every single major distro has rpi instructions, and 8G of ram is more than some laptops come with. So, its a disservice that they don't just tell people, here are a list of disto's which have been qualified to run on the hardware, pick one, and oh BTW, you can run those OS's on your laptop too.

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

#38

Post by gwd »

ncmncm wrote: post #27
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?

> Is this a parallel effort? Or somebody who did it first?

It's not a parallel effort; Stefano Stabellini is actually quoted in The Register article.

There's a tiny bit more technical detail in Stefano's own article here:

https://www.linux.com/featured/xen-on-raspberry-pi-4-adventu...

But for more details you'll have to either look through the git commits, or wait until the LWN article comes out.

Post reply on HN