Quiet time. Just after Linaro ERP release was done.
February
FOSDEM as usual. This time with CentOS/RDO meeting.
Took my daughter Mira to Touluse, France for winter holidays. There was about 17°C which was nice change after week of snow. Visited Aerospace museum and Space city. Nice trip.
Linaro Connect in Budapest. Met friends, saw some nice places in a city. Arrow company presented several boards compatible with 96boards specifications including Enterprise Edition one.
“Root Linux” conference in Kiev, Ukraine. Gave a talk about OpenStack on AArch64 (youtube video).
OpenStack Day in Warsaw, Poland. Few interesting prelections, lot of talks with other developers.
April
OpenStack, OpenStack and OpenStack. And rewriting patches all over again and again.
May
Support for non-x86 support finally landed in Kolla. My goal was to get AArch64 supported and got POWER8/LE support as free bonus.
June
With a friend we went for Sandra concert. Somehow I remembered city name wrong and instead of 1 hour drive it was 4 hour one. Still fun.
Went for long weekend trip to Cologne, Paderborn, Düsseldorf. Ok, main reason was Paderborn where I visited Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum (described as biggest computer museum in the world) and Universität Paderborn where main Aminet server was hosted when I started my Amiga adventure. Museum was nice but I enjoyed Computer History Museum more.
Built first set of OpenStack ‘Pike’ container images for Debian/AArch64.
Started working on DPDK related issues. Then we got assignee to work on it and I only provided updated packages.
July
Visited Linaro office in Harston for a release sprint. And we celebrated my birthday in a pub. Was great.
August
Helped organizing Ingress Anomaly in Szczecin, Poland. We got aroung 1200 agents from many countries. My job was to take care of missions, mosaics and Mission Day. It was exhausting and we have a lot of fun.
September
Attended Riverwash demoscene party.
Went with a friends for a week in Bieszczady mountains. Nearly out of any civilisation related stuff.
Another Linaro Connect. This time around San Francisco. And new 96boards Enterprise Edition hardware — this time in MicroATX form factor: Socionext SynQuacer with 24 cores.
Spent a day in Computer History Museum and still have a feeling that it was not enough time to see everything ;D
Started playing with Bigtop project. Lot of Java stuff, Docker images and porting issues. Reported several bugs, replaced their old AArch64 build slave with two new ones (all three run in Linaro Developer Cloud).
From time to time I try to change web browser (switch Firefox <> Chrome). This time it is moving to Firefox Quantum (v57). And have to say that I have very mixed opinion.
For years it was easy: Chrome is faster, Firefox has extensions which can alter how browser look, feel, work, behave. From Firefox Quantum it is gone. All add-ons have now be “so called” WebExtensions - no way to alter browser itself, only what is presented on web page can be changed.
Say good bye to switching tabs with mouse scroll - function was always missing in Firefox but there was extension for it. Same with tab grouping in tab bar - “Tree Style Tab” is now sidebar and original tab bar has to be disabled through userChrome.css file. Good that they got at least moved reload/stop button to the left side of location…
I will use it for week or two and see it stay or not on my desktop instead of Chrome. Have to admit that main reason for test is tab grouping function in Tree Style Tab as it allows me to get rid of multiple browser windows.
Also I have limited amount of extensions in use to just six ones related to ad blocking/privacy/user scripts.
Months of work, tens of patches, hundreds of changed lines. My whole work in Kolla project got rewarded this week. I am now one of core reviewers :)
What does it mean? I think that Gema summarised it best:
For those of you who don’t know, this means Kolla has recognised our contributions to the project as first class and are giving Marcin and
ARM64 a vote of confidence, they realise we are there to stay.
I found it helpful in my daily work as now I can suggest my coworkers to send their patches directly instead of proxying it through me ;D
In past several friends suggested me to go and donate blood. For some reason I skipped that. Until today.
At Red Hat we have those “We are Red Hat week” (WARHW in short) events. Do not ask me what is going on during them as I have no idea (as I work remotely). There are some celebrations in offices but for me closest one is in Berlin (and I still did not visit it).
Since June there is another Red Hat guy in Szczecin: Damian Wojsław. So we decided to do something as kind of celebration of a WARHW. Warsaw office guys had idea to gather and donate blood so we followed.
Took some forms to fill, blood check, quick chat with some doctor and then 450 ml of blood went away ;D
During Linaro Connect SFO17 I had an occasion to take a look at first 96boards Enterprise Edition MicroATX format board: Socionext SynQuacer. Can it be called first 96boards desktop machine?
Just to remind — 96boards EE specification defined two form factors:
custom 160x120mm
MicroATX
There were attempts to build boards in that custom format (Husky, Cello) but they both failed terribly. Turns out that companies which are able to produce 96boards CE boards are not able to make more complicated ones.
I would say that it looks like typical MicroATX mainboard:
four memory slots (DDR4, up to 64GB, ECC or not ECC)
CPU under heatsink (24 Cortex-A53 cores, 1GHz clock)
PCI-Express slots (x1, x1, x16 with just 4 lanes)
two SATA ports
Gigabit Ethernet port
two USB 3.0 ports at the back
connector for another USB 3.0 ports
96boards low-speed connector (think sensors, serial console, tpm etc)
24pin ATX power connector (no extra +12V ones)
power and reset buttons
fan connector
JTAG port
Socionext SynQuacer
The official announcement did not provide information about price. Only info present was that it will available in December 2017. During discussions with Socionext representatives I was told that full developer box will cost around 1000 USD and involve mainboard, memory, storage (rather not SSD), case and graphics card. Price for just mainboard was not provided as it looked like such option is not planned.
From software point of view there was UEFI presented. With graphical boot. Upstreaming kernel support is in progress (Linaro provides 4.14-rc tree with required changes).
Will it satisfy a need for AArch64 desktop? Time will show. From what I got from developers using it already performance is quite ok as long as it is multithreaded (so kernel build goes nice with -j24 until linking phase kicks in).
Other option for AArch64 desktop would be Macchiatobin. Latest revisions are needed as PCI support got fixed (I was told that first revisions were unable to fully use PCI Express port). Bernhard Rosenkränzer was demoing such setup and it was running nicely.
All started few years ago when I had no idea for a gift from Orlando. So I brought my wife magnet with “someone came for Florida and I got was that stupid magnet” text. Some time later I started own collection…
Today I reorganised magnets because had to add one but there was no space available. I have around 80 magnets from places I visited and some from places to visit.
And small request at the end: if you live in one of places with red marker and there is an option that we meet (conference, other event) then would be great if you bring me magnet ;D
At Linaro we have one of those HPe Moonshot beasts. Basically it is chassis with some Ethernet switches built-in. Then you can plug cartridges with processors into it. There are some x86-64 ones and there are M400 ones with X-Gene cpu, 64GB ram and some SSD storage.
And there was delivery at Linaro office. With huge pile of M400 cartridges. Gema opened chassis and started to plug one after another until we got all 45 slots used (we had 15 cartridges before):
Moonshot chassis filled with m400 cartridges
Turned out that one slot is dead so we have to live without c22n1 cartridge. But that still gives us 44 octa core systems. Each has 64GB ram, storage size varies (some have 480GB, some 120GB, some do not want to tell).
We are waiting for another chassis to fill it with rest of M400s ;D
There will be some work as we need to get them updated to be SBSA/SBBR compliant (U-Boot -> kernel is something I leave for some Company but it is not how Linaro expects) - we need to replace firmware setup.
Plans for use? Linaro Developer Cloud, OpenStack 3rdparty CI and probably several other targets.
Time goes and it is that time of year where Linaro Enterprise Group is working on a new release. And as usual jokes about lack of thermite starts…
Someone may ask “Why?”. Reason is simple: X-Gene 1 processor. I think that it’s hateclub grows and grows with time.
When it was released it was a nice processor. Eight cores, normal SATA, PCI Express, USB, DDR3 memory with ECC etc. It was used for distribution builders, development platforms etc. Not that there was any choice :D
Nowadays with all those other AArch64 processors on a market it starts to be painful. PCI support requires quirks, serial console requires patching etc. We have X-Gene1 in Applied Micro Mustang servers and HPe Moonshot M400 cartridges. Maybe officially those machines are not listed as supported but we still use them so testing a new release work there has to be done.
And each time there are some issues to work around. Some could probably be fixed with firmware updates but I do not know do vendors still support that hardware.
So if you have some spare thermite (and a way to handle that legally) then contact us.
