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The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment

marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl

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Re: The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment

#61

Post by bayindirh »

vk5tu wrote: post #58
bayindirh wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe something I call "the window phenomenon" has occurred. Sometimes, life allows you have the time to do these big experiments on your life and then it gets busy again and you can't dive into it with the same capacity, so you have to do what you have to do while surviving what you have at hand. I have gone through many patches like this, and I believe he had to handle life while is experimental workstation had…

I designed and built my own DSL router: component selection, PCB design, and so on. When NBN upgraded the link to my home I simply went and bought a 10Gbps ethernet router. Despite any compact PC with SFP+ cages doing the same job more cheaply. Exactly because the window of time I had for fooling with home networking had closed.

Same here, I was digging a bug in TrueNAS. I traced the bug, dug the code up, isolated it and let people know. Before doing the detailed bug report, life happened.

At least the code is there, info is there and other people are picking up the flag where I left. This is how I comfort myself. At least I was able to push the process a little further.

Re: The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment

#62

Post by bestouff »

M95D wrote: post #56
dezgeg wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't if the firmware provided DTB doesn't follow any upstream Linux approved bindings and instead uses some vendor kernel specific bindings.

Why would you combine mainline kernel with manufacturer device tree? Kernel includes its own device trees.

(S)he has a point. Sometimes the vendor dtb is all you have.

Re: The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment

#64

Post by cmrdporcupine »

anthonj wrote: post #63
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #14

I use a DGX Spark every day as my daily driver and it's great. I barely use the "AI" facilities of it, but as an Aarch64 desktop Linux, I have no complaints.

Well it's also more than double the price

It wasn't super badly priced when I bought it back in December. It was high, but not insane. It's memory and storage prices that have spiked it. Remember the thing has 128GB of RAM. If you spec a Mac out with the same quantity, it will be in the same price range.

Certainly way cheaper than a Ampere system like the author here is talking about. I actually looked into building such a system and ... it feels weird to gripe about DGX Spark prices when building out a system like that. The Altra requires ECC RAM (though DDR4 at least). Have fun kitting that out.

Those systems were built for highly highly concurrent multicore server (or some workstation) loads. Meant to be carved up into multiple virtual machines, really. I have plenty of applications that would do well on a machine like that, but playing YouTube videos etc is not one of them.

Re: The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment

#65

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

jsnell wrote: post #44
edg5000 wrote: post #17

> there was no org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia in Flatpak repositories for AArch64 All he had to do was build some packages from source, right? It's really worth learning how to do this, since it removes a lot of constraints. And the kernel patch should land in the kernel pretty soon, I hope? He won't have to run a patched kernel forever. Should be possible to get that in a release in a year or so?

I don't know if it's your intent, but that reads really condescending. It's obvious the author knows how to build packages from source. They're working professionally for a Linux distro on arch support! But that was several layers deep into yak shaving broken graphics, and at some point you need to actually get your real work done.

> at some point you need to actually get your real work done

I guess my impression was that in this case the yak shaving was the real work, or at least a part of it? If you're trying to make ARM support fully work in your distro, then daily-driving it and dealing with these things is how you get there. Granted, if that's not the goal and they were just having fun by using an ARM box, that's fair.

Re: The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment

#66

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

M95D wrote: post #60
rwmj wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bad solution compared to having the hardware just enumerate itself like PCI does. (No one uses the firmware supplied DTs because they're usually broken.)

> No one uses the firmware supplied DTs because they're usually broken. Oh, and an even more complex UEFI+ACPI solution won't be broken?

Many years of x86_64 PCs would seem to imply that it empirically has better outcomes.

Re: The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment

#67

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

john_alan wrote: post #35

I’ve been using ARM Debian desktop stably for a long time. I don’t see what the issue is, am I missing something or is this just his hardware choice?

Largely hardware-specific problems, yes, which is typical for ARM in my experience. Although, I would argue that

> It turned out that there was no org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia in Flatpak repositories for AArch64. And I used both of those tools quite often.

is more on the side of being a software problem... with this particular hardware.

Re: The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment

#68

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

I would like to take a moment for this line:

> The “wooster” system stays powered on, churning through RISC-V package builds. It may be weak in single-thread, but it flies when it comes to multi-core load.

Feels vaguely hilarious that the ARM box didn't work out as a desktop, so instead it gets repurposed to cross-compiling RISC-V packages:)

Re: The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment

#69

Post by neobrain »

M95D wrote: post #57
neobrain wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlikely. I've been daily-driving the predecessor (X13s). While it's usable and technically all drivers are there, it's far from "without pain" due to endless number of small but annoying quirks. Just to give you an idea: boot fails 4 out of 5 times, external displays aren't recognized unless plugged in/out several times, sporadic resets during overnight sleep, etc. On top of that speakers will sound prohibitively ti…

> software-side speaker protection What's that?

See https://asahilinux.org/2024/01/fedora-asahi-new/#speakers

The effect is understated there, perhaps because Apple speakers are actually somewhat usable without this feature. For the X13s, the speakers might as well not exist in the current state on Linux.

Re: The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment

#70

Post by anthonj »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #64
anthonj wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it's also more than double the price

It wasn't super badly priced when I bought it back in December. It was high, but not insane. It's memory and storage prices that have spiked it. Remember the thing has 128GB of RAM. If you spec a Mac out with the same quantity, it will be in the same price range. Certainly way cheaper than a Ampere system like the author here is talking about. I actually looked into building such a system and ... it feels weird to gr…

Ahh that's true, I forgot how badly prices are raising
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