I got HoneyComb

Few years ago SolidRun released MACCHIATObin board. Nice fast cpu, PCI Express slot, several network ports. I did not buy it because it supported only 16 GB of memory and I wanted to be able to run OpenStack.

Time has passed, HoneyComb LX2 system appeared on AArch64 market. More cores, more memory. Again I haven’t bought it — my Ryzen 5 upgrade costed less than HoneyComb price is.

And when someone asked me for some serious AArch64 system to buy I was suggesting HoneyComb.

Let us look at hardware

So what do we have here?

HoneyComb board layout
HoneyComb board layout

Lot of networking and there is even version with 100GbE port added: ClearFog CX LX2.

So how I got it?

I wrote that I did not bought it, right? Jon Nettleton (from SolidRun) contacted me recently and asked:

Morning. do you have any interest in a HoneyComb? I have some old stock boards available to the community. I figured it may help you out with your UEFI Qemu work.

We discussed about SBSA/SBBR stuff and I sent him an email with address information and shipping notes.

Some days passed and board arrived. I added spare NVME and two sticks of Kingston HyperX 2933 CL17 memory and it was ready to go (microsd card keeps firmware):

HoneyComb board ready to go
HoneyComb board ready to go

Let’s run something

Debian ‘bullseye’ booted right away. Again I used pendrive from my EBBR compliant RockPro64. Started without problems.

Network ports issue

Ok, there was one problem — on-board ethernet ports do not work yet with mainline nor distribution kernels so I had to dig out my old USB based network card.

There are patches for Linux kernel to get all ports running. May get merged into 5.13 kernel if things go nicely.

Plans?

I plan few things for HoneyComb:

aarch64 computers debian donations fedora honeycomb linaro sbc