During last days I tried to get my Applied Micro Mustang running again. And it looks like it is no more. Like that Norwegian Blue parrot.
Tried some things
By default Mustang outputs information on serial console. It does not here. Checked serial cables, serial to usb dongles. Nothing.
Tried to load firmware from SD card instead of on-board flash. Nope.
Time to put it to rest.
How it looked
When I got it in June 2014 it came in 1U server case. With several loud fans. Including one on cpu radiator. So I took the board out and put into PC Tower case. Also replaced 50mm processor fan with 80mm one:
All that development…
I did several things on it:
- tested USB support
- tested PCI Express support
- run X11 on hardware
- debugged why X11 does not start out of the box
- wrote new instruction how to unbrick it
- run 64 and 32-bit virtual machines
- used it as a desktop (day 1, day 2, last day)
- tested OpenStack
Some of them were done for first time on AArch64.
Board gave me lot of fun. I built countless software packages on it. For CentOS, Debian, Fedora, RHEL. Tested installers of each of them.
Was running OpenStack on it since ‘liberty’ (especially after moving from 16GB to 32GB ram).
What next?
I am going to frame it. With few other devices which helped me during my career.
Replacement?
It would be nice to replace Mustang with some newer AArch64 hardware. From what is available on mass market SolidRun HoneyComb looks closest. But I will wait for something with Armv8.4 cores to be able to play with nested virtualization.
UPDATE: I got it working again.