Is there a storage controller like a SAN that can do provisioned NVMe?
Something like you insert a RPI into a backplane, and it auto-provisions some storage and makes it available to the RPI, in addition to providing power/ethernet.
Mini-ITX Seaberry Adds 11 PCIe Slots to a Raspberry Pi
51–60 of 74 posts
Re: Mini-ITX Seaberry Adds 11 PCIe Slots to a Raspberry Pi
#52Recent 4-cores, 2.0+ Ghz and 4GB RAM ARM SBC's are plenty powerful for most tasks a home user may need. Media consumption, browsing, light text editing, editing the weekend video and even compiling small code bases. People have been doing that in chromebooks for years. Unless you need to compile large code bases, edit serious videos, process huge amounts of data or CAD/games, a simple cheap ARM computer should be eno…
I wonder if there is a blog post in this somewhere, that I could write. I have a bunch of Pi 4s (4GB). I just put one in an Argon M.2 case and was wondering what to do with it. I have a "gut feel" for how my workstation should behave, I am a (backend) software engineer by profession, tend to work my day job on an i7 laptop (XPS 15, Ubuntu) but at home I'm on Ryzen 7 1800X (Manjaro) and Ryzen 9 3900X (Debian). Is ther…
You can try subjective benchmarks. These ARM SBC's are as powerful as workstations from the 90's, so try to use them with as demanding software as what was run on a workstation from the 90's.
Trying to replicate this would certainly do a great blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27796821
Re: Mini-ITX Seaberry Adds 11 PCIe Slots to a Raspberry Pi
#53I am curious if by the time one finishes assembling all this stuff for Pi based IoT appliance the total cost (never mind time) will exceed one of some used laptop / small factor PC which can do the same thing but faster.
Re: Mini-ITX Seaberry Adds 11 PCIe Slots to a Raspberry Pi
#54I have no experience building PCs, but during the last decade or so I've been running RPis with 6-8 disks attached. It's great software and noise wise, but the cases were made by me with MDF (and I have no idea what I'm doing), so it's not as solid as I'd like them to be. Every time I search for rackmount or 3D printed cases I'm floored by the prices, which seem completely out of proportion. Any tips on cheep/custom…
I agree with the advice that you should just use an ATX case. They are a commodity and there are a billion great ones. You'll have to remove the motherboard plate and drill 4 holes for M2.5 standoffs; the full Raspberry Pi dimensions are on the product page, so you can easily print out a 1:1 template, get the right drill bit, and go. No fancy equipment is necessary to drill a small hole in sheet metal, and the result will be very satisfying.
I tend to 3D print my own stuff, and have found it to be the be all and end all of electronics projects enclosures. I never had a good project enclosure until I got a 3D printer, and now I always have them. It's amazing! I have at least 3 different Pi projects, and I designed and printed cases for each of them. It's very straightforward and not a bad project for learning CAD and 3D printing.
8 hard drives are going to be heavy and take up a bunch of space, though, so that's why I'd recommend an off-the-shelf case that already has support for that. (Sheet metal bending is the right fabrication technique for this application, I think, and that's how the cases are made.)
Re: Mini-ITX Seaberry Adds 11 PCIe Slots to a Raspberry Pi
#55Things that are on my wishlist: - Compute-Module should have a unified interface, that is not about to change for the next 3 generations of compute modules - Someone create a "notebook" case having a board with mount for exactly this interface - Case should have a decent keyboard and display without being to big - How about having GPIO pins hidden I would love to have an "upgradable" Notebook with arm architecture...
Have you seen the MNT Reform? There's a pi compute module adapter being built for it.
Re: Mini-ITX Seaberry Adds 11 PCIe Slots to a Raspberry Pi
#56I have no experience building PCs, but during the last decade or so I've been running RPis with 6-8 disks attached. It's great software and noise wise, but the cases were made by me with MDF (and I have no idea what I'm doing), so it's not as solid as I'd like them to be. Every time I search for rackmount or 3D printed cases I'm floored by the prices, which seem completely out of proportion. Any tips on cheep/custom…
It’s probably easier to buy a regular case and then fit the raspberry pi into it.
We should be meeting in the middle and creating SBCs whose bolt holes spacing is identical to some other device standard. For instance 2.5” HDDs, or 3.5-2.5 adapters. Then you can find trays and enclosures and caddies that can be modified slightly to purpose.
Expanding holes in sheet metal is easy. Tapping holes, welding captive nuts, and bending are a lot trickier.
Re: Mini-ITX Seaberry Adds 11 PCIe Slots to a Raspberry Pi
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm pretty sure PCIe is that today. PCIe CPUs may have failed commercially, but they prove that its possible (Xeon Phi). PCIe GPUs are common. 4x or 8x GPUs are your typical mining rigs. Perhaps most common is PCIe SSDs (aka: NVMe or M.2 slots). ------ So our modern PCIe "backplane" gives us storage, extra compute (GPUs most commonly), longer-distance network access (fiber optics, ethernet, etc. etc.). What else do y…
What got me off about VME when i looked at it was the immense amount of small market, single purpose hardware that had been thrown on it and was "technically" compatible. It enabled some stuff like timed traffic lights in a way similar to how Arduinos have opened up hobby level "printer-oid" mechanisms. For reasons i cant articulate well I'm itching for a bus where CPU and GPU and RAM and IO all live together in hipp…
For hobby Arduino level, the bus of note is I2C, with all sorts of devices available. Temperature sensors, accelerometers, cameras, monitor control, flash, ram and of course... other arduinos and Rasp Pis.
Of course, 1Mbit is slow but the huge amount of compatibility is pretty outstanding.
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Today's standard I/O might be Ethernet, as far as just randomly hooking up random compute devices together.
Faster than I2C, but not quite PCIe speeds. You can't deny the huge compatibility available though.
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PCIe is for serious business high end. A few commodity parts are available but some stuff is just really expensive. It's a professional tool for high end fabrics.
The best of the best remains proprietary: Infinity Fabric, UPI. I guess OpenCAPI isn't technically proprietary but few things use that...
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I know there are a bunch of cuda-SDR projects btw. I don't know how well they work but GPUs probably are great at Fourier Transforms and other filtering tasks.
Re: Mini-ITX Seaberry Adds 11 PCIe Slots to a Raspberry Pi
#58Recent 4-cores, 2.0+ Ghz and 4GB RAM ARM SBC's are plenty powerful for most tasks a home user may need. Media consumption, browsing, light text editing, editing the weekend video and even compiling small code bases. People have been doing that in chromebooks for years. Unless you need to compile large code bases, edit serious videos, process huge amounts of data or CAD/games, a simple cheap ARM computer should be eno…
I wonder if there is a blog post in this somewhere, that I could write. I have a bunch of Pi 4s (4GB). I just put one in an Argon M.2 case and was wondering what to do with it. I have a "gut feel" for how my workstation should behave, I am a (backend) software engineer by profession, tend to work my day job on an i7 laptop (XPS 15, Ubuntu) but at home I'm on Ryzen 7 1800X (Manjaro) and Ryzen 9 3900X (Debian). Is ther…
One significant bottleneck in a common desktop Rpi would be the SD card. You can improve a lot by putting the root filesystem on SATA-over-USB or use the CM with an appropriate board.
If you'd have been in the market for a new board, I would have recommended something that exposes PCIe, or at least SATA.
The best non-SoM option There is also Quartz64 and Rock 3A (max 8GB RAM, PCIe3). But it's going to take a while until community and mainline kernel support make the RK3566/RK3568 ready for a casual user.
You're going to have to be conscious about multitasking. Having 100 browser tabs open is not going to fly. And while 4k may be theoretically possible, you don't want to do that. Other than that I think it's all right.
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I have a similar profile to yourself. Currently drafting a small cyberdeck - maybe more as a replacement for smartphone than PC use.
Re: Mini-ITX Seaberry Adds 11 PCIe Slots to a Raspberry Pi
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
What got me off about VME when i looked at it was the immense amount of small market, single purpose hardware that had been thrown on it and was "technically" compatible. It enabled some stuff like timed traffic lights in a way similar to how Arduinos have opened up hobby level "printer-oid" mechanisms. For reasons i cant articulate well I'm itching for a bus where CPU and GPU and RAM and IO all live together in hipp…
For hobby Arduino level, the bus of note is I2C, with all sorts of devices available. Temperature sensors, accelerometers, cameras, monitor control, flash, ram and of course... other arduinos and Rasp Pis. Of course, 1Mbit is slow but the huge amount of compatibility is pretty outstanding. ---------- Today's standard I/O might be Ethernet, as far as just randomly hooking up random compute devices together. Faster tha…
I2C is present in most modern computers. Look up SMBus.
SPI is as well
Re: Mini-ITX Seaberry Adds 11 PCIe Slots to a Raspberry Pi
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting, thank you!
The other neat thing is that peer-to-peer PCIe transactions do not have to go through the root complex (the Pi in this case). Say you have a GPU and an NVMe drive or video capture card plugged into a PCIe switch, which is then plugged into the Pi. If your software supports having these devices directly communicate, they can do so as fast as their PCIe links support doing, even though there’s only the tiny link to the…
Don't you mean the CPU can only full-duplex with a few GPU's at a time?
And are you sure that GPU's are actually talking with each other?
Forgive me if I'm woefully out of date/having a massive brainfart, but last I heard, GPU's got CPU-less DMA a few years ago allowing access to system memory, but programming/setting up the pipelines/cleanup/repriming/output consolidation was still solely a CPU-centric work stream.
So like, yeah, your GPU does it's thing and dumps the result in a buffer in it's memory space, and might even be smart enough to shlup a buffer back to system RAM to get the result forwarded somewhere else when the CPU gets around to telling the storage controller to do it...
But did I completely sleep through something absolutely amazing? Are GPU's passing messages/shared memory space aware now? Like,
"Oh, my jobs done, shlup this buffer off to pcie device->compute_card_2 for the next stage of processing."
Because if they're that smart now, holy crap, I have reading to do.