opteron a1100 arm

[Adrian Chadd]

On 5 February 2014 10:11, Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling at kev009.com> wrote:
> On 2/5/2014 6:44 AM, Jim Thompson wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Feb 5, 2014, at 1:55, Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling at kev009.com> wrote:
>>>
>> [...]
>>
>>> Where A1100 wins hands down is memory capacity, and possibly even memory
>>> bandwidth (DDR4 mentioned in the PR..).
>>>
>>> Intel's server Atom chips and even the extremely powerful Xeon E3 are
>>> quite limited by 32GB RAM (and it's also somewhat expensive vs RDIMMs).
>>
>>
>> I'm not sure what your point is.
>
>
> Simply that this is a better chip than Intel's current low end offerings
> because all relevant bandwidths are much higher (RAM, I/O, net) and these
> matter more to many DC workloads.
>
>
>> The C2750, C2550, C2558 & C2758 will all address 64 GB of DDR3 RAM.
>>
>> You'll have to use Registered DIMMs and likely drop back to DDR3 to get to
>> 128GB on the A1100.
>>
>> So I see parity in terms of addressable RAM.
>
>
> That's half, and a big deal if you want to run multiple VMs or a large ARC
> or many large JVM heaps or any number of other things.  You're trying to
> claim the chip is already matched by the current Atom, where it is clearly
> not, so I'll fire it back at you - I'm not sure what your point is.
>
> I'm happy to see the announcement and am looking forward to running FreeBSD
> on the platform with others.

But that's not enough - some one / some company has to step up and do
a port, then run with it long enough in -HEAD to make it stable for
general use.

Almost all of the ARM stuff in FreeBSD doesn't fall under this
category. It's getting better, but in a lot of instances the ports are
done for very specific chipsets and/or use cases and that doesn't
stress the rest of the system out enough.

The MIPS port went through this too, FWIW - it initially was stable if
you never bothered doing much in userland, but userland suffered from
a lot of random hilarity. so if you were a router that occasionally
ran ntpd, it was great. If you were an AP that kept going into hostapd
to do things, it would get upset. "make all install clean" in a port
directory wasn't great. It was only through repeated head-slamming
from Warner, Juli and others that this stuff got ironed out enough.

So, I'm all for the platform - who's going to port it? Step up please
and be cheered. :-P



-a