ARM hardware and SATA

ARM hardware and SATA

[Lucio De Re]

I'd like suggestions for some hardware on which to run Plan 9, almost
certainly expandable SSD capacity will be a must (Venti service).
Price and quality will be the biggest factors, as always.

Ideally, storage is where the value will reside, the actual processor
could be expendable.

ARM would allow me to start with Richard Miller's release, which I
believe to be a very sound foundation.

Thanks for any and all comments.

Lucio.

Re: [9fans] ARM hardware and SATA

[Dan Cross]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1340 bytes --]

We had 9legacy running on Intel NUCs at Google for our internal
development. It worked well enough, though of course wasn't an ARM based
machine. Getting it going was a little hacky, but not too bad. We were
using raspberry pi's as terminals.

I haven't looked in depth, but I suspect there's relatively little support
for SATA interfaces in Richard's BCM code. Targeting something like the
BananaPi W2 as a small server would probably be doable and the delta from
Richard's code would be smaller than an ersatz port.

        - Dan C.


On Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 12:02 PM Lucio De Re <lucio.dere@gmail.com> wrote:

> I'd like suggestions for some hardware on which to run Plan 9, almost
> certainly expandable SSD capacity will be a must (Venti service).
> Price and quality will be the biggest factors, as always.
>
> Ideally, storage is where the value will reside, the actual processor
> could be expendable.
>
> ARM would allow me to start with Richard Miller's release, which I
> believe to be a very sound foundation.
>
> Thanks for any and all comments.
>
> Lucio.
>
> ------------------------------------------
> 9fans: 9fans
> Permalink:
> https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tfa3a09b0e78ea56b-M6bc9d051ece7ae7925fb6867
> Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2028 bytes --]

Re: [9fans] ARM hardware and SATA

[Bakul Shah]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2342 bytes --]

With a USB3 SSD I have been able to get over 200MB/s sequential (under linux, on RPI4).
You can get a TB SSD for under $150 that can theoretically do 540MB/s (on a USB3.1 but
pi4 is usb3 so half the peak throughput). For a venti server your bottleneck will be the GBe.

I haven't been able to run Richard's latest image (may have to do with eeprom updates I did)
so no idea what 9pi does as yet.

> On Dec 12, 2019, at 12:30 AM, Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> We had 9legacy running on Intel NUCs at Google for our internal development. It worked well enough, though of course wasn't an ARM based machine. Getting it going was a little hacky, but not too bad. We were using raspberry pi's as terminals.
> 
> I haven't looked in depth, but I suspect there's relatively little support for SATA interfaces in Richard's BCM code. Targeting something like the BananaPi W2 as a small server would probably be doable and the delta from Richard's code would be smaller than an ersatz port.
> 
>         - Dan C.
> 
> 
> On Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 12:02 PM Lucio De Re <lucio.dere@gmail.com <mailto:lucio.dere@gmail.com>> wrote:
> I'd like suggestions for some hardware on which to run Plan 9, almost
> certainly expandable SSD capacity will be a must (Venti service).
> Price and quality will be the biggest factors, as always.
> 
> Ideally, storage is where the value will reside, the actual processor
> could be expendable.
> 
> ARM would allow me to start with Richard Miller's release, which I
> believe to be a very sound foundation.
> 
> Thanks for any and all comments.
> 
> Lucio.
> 
> ------------------------------------------
> 9fans: 9fans
> Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tfa3a09b0e78ea56b-M6bc9d051ece7ae7925fb6867 <https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tfa3a09b0e78ea56b-M6bc9d051ece7ae7925fb6867>
> Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription <https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription>
> 9fans <https://9fans.topicbox.com/latest> / 9fans / see discussions <https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans> + participants <https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/members> + delivery options <https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription>Permalink <https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tfa3a09b0e78ea56b-Mb7916a939d1b3ea5c7cf7b1f>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 4028 bytes --]

Re: [9fans] ARM hardware and SATA

[Juan Cuzmar]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1606 bytes --]

Wow I'm surprised that people are still working on plan9 to
develop things especially in google... If I could aso: what kind
of things you develop with plan9?

Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
> We had 9legacy running on Intel NUCs at Google for our internal
> development. It worked well enough, though of course wasn't an
> ARM based machine. Getting it going was a little hacky, but not
> too bad. We were using raspberry pi's as terminals.
> 
> I haven't looked in depth, but I suspect there's relatively
> little support for SATA interfaces in Richard's BCM code.
> Targeting something like the BananaPi W2 as a small server
> would probably be doable and the delta from Richard's code
> would be smaller than an ersatz port.
> 
>         - Dan C.
> 
> 
> On Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 12:02 PM Lucio De Re
> <lucio.dere@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > I'd like suggestions for some hardware on which to run Plan 9, almost
> > certainly expandable SSD capacity will be a must (Venti service).
> > Price and quality will be the biggest factors, as always.
> > 
> > Ideally, storage is where the value will reside, the actual processor
> > could be expendable.
> > 
> > ARM would allow me to start with Richard Miller's release, which I
> > believe to be a very sound foundation.
> > 
> > Thanks for any and all comments.
> > 
> > Lucio.
> 
> ------------------------------------------
> 9fans: 9fans
> Permalink:
> https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tfa3a09b0e78ea56b-Mb7916a939d1b3ea5c7cf7b1f
> Delivery options:
> https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription

Re: [9fans] ARM hardware and SATA

[hiro]

at google i think they are very often using acme to program web services in go
check out golang.org

Re: [9fans] ARM hardware and SATA

[Juan Cuzmar]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 479 bytes --]

I'm ask because maybe if you're using plan9 maybe you could
contribute to it maturing further.

hiro <23hiro@gmail.com> wrote:
> at google i think they are very often using acme to program web
> services in go check out golang.org
> 
> ------------------------------------------
> 9fans: 9fans
> Permalink:
> https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tfa3a09b0e78ea56b-M3ea2403c19b89e1566a1853d
> Delivery options:
> https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription

Re: [9fans] ARM hardware and SATA

[Matthew Singletary]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 871 bytes --]

I think you are assuming that they don't.

On Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 8:04 AM Juan Cuzmar <juan.cuzmar.s@gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm ask because maybe if you're using plan9 maybe you could
> contribute to it maturing further.
>
> hiro <23hiro@gmail.com> wrote:
> > at google i think they are very often using acme to program web
> > services in go check out golang.org
> >
> > ------------------------------------------
> > 9fans: 9fans
> > Permalink:
> >
> https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tfa3a09b0e78ea56b-M3ea2403c19b89e1566a1853d
> > Delivery options:
> > https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
> ------------------------------------------
> 9fans: 9fans
> Permalink:
> https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tfa3a09b0e78ea56b-M9ae1852fb543ee13c9730f72
> Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1859 bytes --]

Re: [9fans] ARM hardware and SATA

[David Arnold]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1586 bytes --]

> On 12 Dec 2019, at 17:31, Lucio De Re <lucio.dere@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I'd like suggestions for some hardware on which to run Plan 9, almost
> certainly expandable SSD capacity will be a must (Venti service).
> Price and quality will be the biggest factors, as always.
> 
> Ideally, storage is where the value will reside, the actual processor
> could be expendable.
> 
> ARM would allow me to start with Richard Miller's release, which I
> believe to be a very sound foundation.
> 
> Thanks for any and all comments.

This is very likely overkill, but

   https://www.96boards.org/product/developerbox/ <https://www.96boards.org/product/developerbox/>
   https://www.chip1stop.com/USA/en/product/detail?partId=SOCI-0000003&mpn=SC0FQAA-B-000 <https://www.chip1stop.com/USA/en/product/detail?partId=SOCI-0000003&mpn=SC0FQAA-B-000>

It’s a µATX PC-style motherboard, with what looks like standard PC power connector.
It has a 24-core ARM8 CPU, up to 64GB RAM (4 DIMM slots), onboard 1 Gbps Ethernet, looks like two on-board SATA ports, and (most usefully) 1 PCIe x16 and 2 PCIe x1 slots.

You could populate the x16 PCIe slot with an M.2 carrier board, like

   https://amfeltec.com/pci-express-gen-3-carrier-board-for-m-2-ssd <https://amfeltec.com/pci-express-gen-3-carrier-board-for-m-2-ssd>

to give you a decent amount of high-speed SSD storage?

The motherboard appears to have been sponsored by Linaro, which is some sort of Linux-on-ARM booster organisation, so it’s likely got decent documentation and/or sample drivers available.



d


[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2514 bytes --]

Re: [9fans] ARM hardware and SATA

[Dan Cross]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2935 bytes --]

Our use of plan9 was really incidental and was in support of our work on
Akaros. It was a tool we used to support our development environment, but
not a focus of development itself nor something we did development on
directly. We did contribute a few things back to 9legacy; some bug fixes
for the i218 driver where the NIC would lock up come to mind; we found a
few bugs in the 9pi USB stack that Richard fixed. I suppose that counts as
"improving" plan9.

Work on Akaros has stopped however, at least at Google.

Those that I know who use acme at Google are not, generally, writing web
services. Rather, they are working on the Go compiler and runtime. I
suppose it's possible that someone uses acme to write web services, but the
number of people doing that kind of thing is actually pretty small, even
though a lot of people think of Google as a "web" company. I dunno; I work
on kernels.

        - Dan C.


On Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 5:47 PM Juan Cuzmar <juan.cuzmar.s@gmail.com> wrote:

> Wow I'm surprised that people are still working on plan9 to
> develop things especially in google... If I could aso: what kind
> of things you develop with plan9?
>
> Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
> > We had 9legacy running on Intel NUCs at Google for our internal
> > development. It worked well enough, though of course wasn't an
> > ARM based machine. Getting it going was a little hacky, but not
> > too bad. We were using raspberry pi's as terminals.
> >
> > I haven't looked in depth, but I suspect there's relatively
> > little support for SATA interfaces in Richard's BCM code.
> > Targeting something like the BananaPi W2 as a small server
> > would probably be doable and the delta from Richard's code
> > would be smaller than an ersatz port.
> >
> >         - Dan C.
> >
> >
> > On Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 12:02 PM Lucio De Re
> > <lucio.dere@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > I'd like suggestions for some hardware on which to run Plan 9, almost
> > > certainly expandable SSD capacity will be a must (Venti service).
> > > Price and quality will be the biggest factors, as always.
> > >
> > > Ideally, storage is where the value will reside, the actual processor
> > > could be expendable.
> > >
> > > ARM would allow me to start with Richard Miller's release, which I
> > > believe to be a very sound foundation.
> > >
> > > Thanks for any and all comments.
> > >
> > > Lucio.
> >
> > ------------------------------------------
> > 9fans: 9fans
> > Permalink:
> >
> https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tfa3a09b0e78ea56b-Mb7916a939d1b3ea5c7cf7b1f
> > Delivery options:
> > https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
> ------------------------------------------
> 9fans: 9fans
> Permalink:
> https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tfa3a09b0e78ea56b-M4e6f7e9ded09cec99479a158
> Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 4318 bytes --]

Re: [9fans] ARM hardware and SATA

[Juan Cuzmar]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3407 bytes --]

Ah I see.
Thanks Dan for answer me.


Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
> Our use of plan9 was really incidental and was in support of
> our work on Akaros. It was a tool we used to support our
> development environment, but not a focus of development itself
> nor something we did development on directly. We did contribute
> a few things back to 9legacy; some bug fixes for the i218
> driver where the NIC would lock up come to mind; we found a few
> bugs in the 9pi USB stack that Richard fixed. I suppose that
> counts as "improving" plan9.
> 
> Work on Akaros has stopped however, at least at Google.
> 
> Those that I know who use acme at Google are not, generally,
> writing web services. Rather, they are working on the Go
> compiler and runtime. I suppose it's possible that someone uses
> acme to write web services, but the number of people doing that
> kind of thing is actually pretty small, even though a lot of
> people think of Google as a "web" company. I dunno; I work on
> kernels.
> 
>         - Dan C.
> 
> 
> On Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 5:47 PM Juan Cuzmar
> <juan.cuzmar.s@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Wow I'm surprised that people are still working on plan9 to
> > develop things especially in google... If I could aso: what kind
> > of things you develop with plan9?
> >
> > Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > We had 9legacy running on Intel NUCs at Google for our internal
> > > development. It worked well enough, though of course wasn't an
> > > ARM based machine. Getting it going was a little hacky, but not
> > > too bad. We were using raspberry pi's as terminals.
> > >
> > > I haven't looked in depth, but I suspect there's relatively
> > > little support for SATA interfaces in Richard's BCM code.
> > > Targeting something like the BananaPi W2 as a small server
> > > would probably be doable and the delta from Richard's code
> > > would be smaller than an ersatz port.
> > >
> > >         - Dan C.
> > >
> > >
> > > On Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 12:02 PM Lucio De Re
> > > <lucio.dere@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > > I'd like suggestions for some hardware on which to run Plan 9, almost
> > > > certainly expandable SSD capacity will be a must (Venti service).
> > > > Price and quality will be the biggest factors, as always.
> > > >
> > > > Ideally, storage is where the value will reside, the actual processor
> > > > could be expendable.
> > > >
> > > > ARM would allow me to start with Richard Miller's release, which I
> > > > believe to be a very sound foundation.
> > > >
> > > > Thanks for any and all comments.
> > > >
> > > > Lucio.
> > >
> > > ------------------------------------------
> > > 9fans: 9fans
> > > Permalink:
> > >
> > https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tfa3a09b0e78ea56b-Mb7916a939d1b3ea5c7cf7b1f
> > > Delivery options:
> > > https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
> > ------------------------------------------
> > 9fans: 9fans
> > Permalink:
> > https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tfa3a09b0e78ea56b-M4e6f7e9ded09cec99479a158
> > Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
> >
> 
> ------------------------------------------
> 9fans: 9fans
> Permalink:
> https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tfa3a09b0e78ea56b-M58e0974725293d89ca3556d3
> Delivery options:
> https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription

Re: [9fans] ARM hardware and SATA

[hiro]

generally, i would like better hardware, too. i'm especially curious
about chipsets that include QSFP or even QSFP+ with lowest possible
total power consumption in idle. not much random computation power
needed, but i want all the benefits of full throughput at 10gbit or
40gbit, speeding up sequential file transfers like backups. i.e. at
big block size.

Re: [9fans] ARM hardware and SATA

[hiro]

Dan, does that mean you are allowed to have actual "research" projects
at google? i just never thought something like this would be possible,
and never realized akaros happened at google itself. i imagined the
involvement of universities instead, but i clearly didn't check
closely enough.
I hear only bad news from google lately, but if they give enough
freedom to also do basic research (or let's call it OS development
cause IT research is an oxymoron) that's great news to me indeed :)
And as you said all i know of google is their web site. or knew, cause
many useful services like google code search are no more. at least
google mail still works :P

Re: [9fans] ARM hardware and SATA

[hiro]

this guy "brho" seems to still work on akaros!
https://github.com/brho/akaros

Re: [9fans] ARM hardware and SATA

[Dan Cross]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2085 bytes --]

Google invests heavily into basic computer science reseach, and Google
researchers are well represented at respected conferences and in high
impact journals in their subfields. So yes, one can do 'actual "research"
projects' at Google. We have an entire research organization doing just
that, often in collaboration with academia: https://research.google/

However, not everyone working on experimental projects at Google is doing
what one might call "research". For some, such as myself, the line can be
blurry, but I'm firmly in a development camp, as are most people I know. To
put it succinctly for me, as for many others, the job isn't to publish
papers or present results, it's to write software of value to Google.
However, we have considerable latitude to investigate new and innovative
ways of writing that software.

Of course, that also entails taking lessons learned from systems outside of
the mainstream.

It's true that Barret still works on Akaros: it was his PhD thesis topic.
However, Google is no longer investing in it directly.

        - Dan C.

On Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 8:54 PM hiro <23hiro@gmail.com> wrote:

> Dan, does that mean you are allowed to have actual "research" projects
> at google? i just never thought something like this would be possible,
> and never realized akaros happened at google itself. i imagined the
> involvement of universities instead, but i clearly didn't check
> closely enough.
> I hear only bad news from google lately, but if they give enough
> freedom to also do basic research (or let's call it OS development
> cause IT research is an oxymoron) that's great news to me indeed :)
> And as you said all i know of google is their web site. or knew, cause
> many useful services like google code search are no more. at least
> google mail still works :P
>
> ------------------------------------------
> 9fans: 9fans
> Permalink:
> https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tfa3a09b0e78ea56b-M83eb9f288fd21e628ab53d6d
> Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2879 bytes --]

Re: [9fans] ARM hardware and SATA

[hiro]

thanks dan :)

Re: [9fans] ARM hardware and SATA

[David Arnold]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 709 bytes --]


> On 12 Dec 2019, at 17:32, Lucio De Re <lucio.dere@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I'd like suggestions for some hardware on which to run Plan 9, almost
> certainly expandable SSD capacity will be a must (Venti service).
> Price and quality will be the biggest factors, as always.
> 
> Ideally, storage is where the value will reside, the actual processor
> could be expendable.
> 
> ARM would allow me to start with Richard Miller's release, which I
> believe to be a very sound foundation.
> 
> Thanks for any and all comments.

A friend pointed me at this today.

If the SSD speed doesn’t need PCIe, this might make for a cheap option?

https://wiki.radxa.com/Dual_Quad_SATA_HAT




d

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1936 bytes --]