Since I started working on AArch64 in 2012, I had been searching for a hardware system capable of meeting my development needs at home.
Pinkie Pie
In 2014, I got Applied Micro Mustang for home use. I named it “pinkiepie” because I use cartoon-character names for all systems I manage. As both mustangs and ponies are types of horse, I decided that Pinkie Pie from My Little Pony was a good name.
This system served me for several years. With 8 cores, 32 GB RAM, and a SATA SSD for storage, it was enough to build RHEL, Fedora, Debian packages — both for AArch64 and 32-bit armhf.
It failed in 2020, was briefly operational again, but has remained non-operational since then.
Jagular
In 2021, I acquired Solidrun HoneyComb. With sixteen Cortex-A72 cores, 32 GB RAM, and SATA SSD from Pinkiepie, it served as my development machine.
Jagular’s name came from Winnie the Pooh, as this system was my own (unlike Mustang, which was Red Hat property).
Applejack
In 2023, I took a chance and replaced my work laptop with an Apple MacBook Pro. This gave me more modern Arm system with 10 fast CPU cores.
The system’s name came from My Little Pony again.
After the installation of Fedora Asahi Remix on the MacBook, I moved Jagular to storage. And sold it in 2025.
Radxa Orion C6
At the end of 2024, Radxa announced “World’s First Open Source Arm V9 Motherboard”. Several people sent me a link to it. I checked the details and decided to wait for any delivery of source code for this platform.
It took them months to release anything. An old (6.1.44) version of the Linux kernel, a copy of EDK2 sources with 23 megabytes of binary blobs.
The good part was that this SBC was capable of running mainline Linux in ACPI mode. Still, the situation regarding it was far from what their slogan promised…
There were “Arm V9” systems before it, so it was not “World’s First”. There were several blobs needed to run it, so it was not “Open Source”.
I was following discussions on their forum and had a feeling that the more I read, the more I postpone my order.
RHEL and 64k page size
After leaving Linaro, I started working on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) again. And while most things can be tested in virtual machines on Applejack, some tasks require booting 64k page size kernels — which the Apple M1 Pro is not capable of doing.
As a temporary solution, I used remote boxes from the Red Hat lab, but it was not a good solution in the long term.
So I started searching again.
Ampere Altra?
In May 2024, I was one step from spending 3000 EUR on Ampere Altra-based workstation — the typical 64-core system with 128 GB of RAM.
I did not buy it because at that time I was looking at it as an Arm desktop. Which, at that time, it was far from — issues with AMD cards under Linux required patching the kernel with out-of-tree patches.
Time passed, and I looked at it from different perspective — as “a tool”.
You see — I split computer systems into two categories: tools and toys.
Tools
Computer systems that have to do their job are tools. My x86-64 desktop is a tool. The same with my x86-64 NAS, or my work laptop.
Those systems have their purposes and have to work. No tricks with firmware or operating systems, no self-built kernels.
Toys
Some of my computer systems are toys — I do not expect them to be stable, I do not keep any important data on them. This is where most of my Arm SBCs (Seriously Bad Computers) are.
FriendlyElec NanoPC-T6 LTS on my desk is a perfect example. At this moment, it is offline and waits for firmware reflashing because I flashed the wrong file two weeks ago. And many times I have run my own kernels on it to check some out-of-tree patches adding support for hardware features.
Ampere Altra then
In March, I decided to go and buy an Ampere Altra system. But this time, on a budget: a brand new motherboard, a used CPU, used RAM.
I got a few people interested, tried to find a way for some kind of discount and started ordering parts. During the next few weeks I will build myself yet another development machine. For my own use, at home.
But this will be another blog post.