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Building an ARM64 home server the hard way

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Re: Building an ARM64 home server the hard way

#81

Post by lostlogin »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #39
radiator wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any boxes without a graphics card or at least with a primitive one? So that they would be more economical in case you only need them for the role of a server?

None of them have a dedicated GPU, just a low-powered one built into the CPU. Using a CPU without an integrated GPU would only shave a few dollars off the cost, so I don't that is a common choice.

The weird extreme range (not really Nucs in my view) have a pci slot, seemingly for a large graphics card. They’ll take an SFP card though, and that’s a excellent, though probably the most expensive mini server one could buy.

Re: Building an ARM64 home server the hard way

#82

Post by jrockway »

drdaeman wrote: post #79

This seems to be low-power entry-level stuff. I'm curious, is there anything more serious - but less serious than some proper rack server hardware? Currently I'm running a home server on EPYC 3251 mini-ITX board, which I use to route 1GbE WAN and 10GbE LAN, serve as a NAS, and run a bunch of services all without it breaking a sweat, and leaving plenty of headroom shall I want to run more stuff there. It sits on my de…

I'm interested too and have pretty much come to the same conclusion as you. There are workstations like this: https://store.avantek.co.uk/ampere-emag-64bit-arm-workstatio...

It's a middle ground between Raspberry Pi and a 128 core they sell to cloud providers. For the money, you can probably get more work done with an amd64 workstation, unless you're paying someone to generate your electricity by riding a bicycle or something. (Cooling and power matter to cloud-scale datacenters, but not really for one computer in a room that you use to generate your income.)

Re: Building an ARM64 home server the hard way

#83

Post by FullyFunctional »

It's a nice write up. but as much as I love whole-drive filesystems, in this case I would have used a partition table and used a fixed partition for the swap space. Not only is it (slightly) more efficient, it's also simpler than using a btrfs subvolume and remembering to +C the swapfile.

I think the general approach is very good and could probably be used for the VisionFive 2 RISC-V SBC as well.

Re: Building an ARM64 home server the hard way

#87

Post by e40 »

johnklos wrote: post #42

I was hoping for something more akin to what the word "building" usually implies - something a bit more physical. If nothing else, the author made a box for it ;) The RockPro64 is a good board with lots of expandability. I run NetBSD/aarch64eb on one to build all of NetBSD's pkgsrc packages (26,000). It performs well with an m.2 NVMe, and has been rock solid. Of course, for anyone using the RockPro64, if you plan to…

Yes, I was hoping to learn about inexpensive aarch64 server hardware solutions (ready made).

Re: Building an ARM64 home server the hard way

#88

Post by fellowmartian »

daneel_w wrote: post #2

For the Pine family of SBCs I highly recommend installing Tow-Boot - https://tow-boot.org/ - on the SPI flash memory to allow yourself much better boot options, including booting directly from NVMe so you don't need to keep the MicroSD card plugged-in.

Alternatively one could go for Barebox, it’s neat and standardized like Tow-boot, but it’s not phone-focused and works on many more boards.

Re: Building an ARM64 home server the hard way

#89

Post by irusensei »

MobiusHorizons wrote: post #74

I have this same board running freebsd as a NAS. It has been a pretty great experience overall. My main gripe has been that I would really like to be able to run an nvme drive for a cache at the same time as SATA ports, and I haven't found any cost effective PCIE2.0 x4 switches that I could use for that purpose. There is an x1 switch for use with RP4, but it is a shame to lose all the bandwidth. I'm looking forward t…

Issue with FreeBSD on RockPro64 and similar boards is that the scheduler doesnt support big.little configurations therefore the OS doesnt make distinctions between the 2 A72 cores and the weaker A55s.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm/RockChip#Known_issues

Re: Building an ARM64 home server the hard way

#90

Post by galangalalgol »

e40 wrote: post #87
johnklos wrote: post #42

I was hoping for something more akin to what the word "building" usually implies - something a bit more physical. If nothing else, the author made a box for it ;) The RockPro64 is a good board with lots of expandability. I run NetBSD/aarch64eb on one to build all of NetBSD's pkgsrc packages (26,000). It performs well with an m.2 NVMe, and has been rock solid. Of course, for anyone using the RockPro64, if you plan to…

Yes, I was hoping to learn about inexpensive aarch64 server hardware solutions (ready made).

I was thinking maybe they found a salvage sale for old oracle or aws aarch64 servers. I'd love one of those. A second best would be a jetson agx probably.
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