[Trisquel-devel] success on arm64 Supermicro ARS-110M-NR

[Simon Josefsson]

Jing Luo <jing at jing.rocks> writes:

> Hi Simon and bill-auger and maybe Luis and Rubén,
>
> I also have good news! I just installed Trisquel on my new arm64
> server and it looks good.

Yay!

>> congrats - AFAIK, this is the first powerful non-x86 computer that
>> is known to
>> run a libre distro; so it is a significant landmark
>
> Talos II (2019) is also powerful too...? FSF has one I think.

Yes, I have them too and I find them sufficiently powerful, and they
also have libre BIOS and firmware something these arm machines lack.

> Unlike Simon, I used the prebuilt Trisquel ISO:
>
> https://repo.jing.rocks/trisquel-iso/trisquel-netinst_11.0.1_arm64.iso

That is the same image that I used:

fe9626483a1b46ce2b99ac24ce047828e57d8f245083cc0bc421511aaf8e5ddd

The ISO is inside the tarball I gave the link to.

> formatted the rootfs as btrfs, with linux-generic-64k-hwe-11.0-edge

What is the benefit of the 64k kernels?  The package description doesn't
really say one would just them over the other ones.  Are there
performance differences?

Right now, I am using linux-libre 6.9.8 on my machine (thanks Jason for
releasing gnu-2.0 versions in gzip format!) because of a known (mostly
cosmetic) bug with the mpt3sas driver that also occurs on amd64.  I
didn't have any issues with the vanilla trisquel kernel before adding
the LSI card to the machine.  I tried the linux-libre-lts 6.6 packages
and they work fine on this machine too.

I'll see if I can post some benchmarks on my machine eventually, I want
to setup a GitLab runner in a VM on it that I could ask to build the
kernel package for me.

>> So...if Luiz or Rubén is reading this, I would be happy to host a VM
>> for Trisquel to speed up jenkins builds, seeing that Trisquel is
>> using a ROCK 3A for the build farm. It should be 20~30 times faster.
>
> There are plans to improve the node stack, as Ecne will be adding
> riscv and more load to arm, but that's is still on it's way. Using
> community vm/nodes might require to layout some security policies, and
> some other directives, we'll need to find some time to define those if
> moving in that direction.

I am also happy sponsor build machines here, but I understand the
dilemma about riscv.  Either you purchase some riscv machine and set it
up yourself (I am happy to donate funding for this), but then as far as
I understand the requirements, we would need to make sure it runs on
only free software and no blobs.  I got my Milky-V Pioneer riscv machine
working via upstream's kernel image and Debian debootstrap.  I have
tried installing both Debian and linux-libre kernels, but I just get a
blank screen when booting.  I have been hoping for months that the
Debian people make progress on a kernel for this hardware, but I don't
know if there is any known problem or just lack of time.  So we don't
really know if this machine can ever boot without some non-free blob or
not.  The alternative is to build in people's VM, and I'm happy to setup
a VM on the riscv machine I have, but then there are BOTH trust issues
with the hoster and the uncertainty about freedom of the hardware.

I don't know of a way to resolve this... I would be unhappy if ecne
won't ship with riscv due to this.  There are not that many unique
packages in trisquel, it would be entirely possible to rebuild all of
them on a new hardware eventually to increase trust in the packages.

For arm64 I think there are many boards available on the market cheaply
that would suffice, but I didn't think performance was a real problem
today.

/Simon
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