[9front] 19,21 ARM Dev Summit and porting to Solid-Run hardware

[9front] 19,21 ARM Dev Summit and porting to Solid-Run hardware

[v]

Hello,

How good are the chances for 9front to reachout to Arm industry partners (two links below, see) and port Plan 9 operating system to new ARM cpu?  I just discovered 9front has ports to bcm and bcm64 but those are older arm cpu.

Best,

-- 
v
9SDF Public Access Plan 9 System
=> https://devsummit.arm.com arm DevSummit Oct 19-21 Virtual
=> https://developer.solid-run.com

Re: [9front] 19,21 ARM Dev Summit and porting to Solid-Run hardware

[Kurt H Maier]

On Sun, Oct 10, 2021 at 04:28:40PM +1100, v@9p.sdf.org wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> How good are the chances for 9front to reachout to Arm industry partners (two links below, see) and port Plan 9 operating system to new ARM cpu?  I just discovered 9front has ports to bcm and bcm64 but those are older arm cpu.
> 
> Best,
> 
> -- 
> v
> 9SDF Public Access Plan 9 System
> => https://devsummit.arm.com arm DevSummit Oct 19-21 Virtual
> => https://developer.solid-run.com
> 

Generally speaking, step 1 to porting 9front to a certain piece of
hardware involves 9front users owning that hardware.  I know a couple of
us have i.MXM8MQ devices, but ARM ports in general suck because there
is no standardization.

The ARM developer summit is a useless sales event; if you need evidence,
look to the presentations from Amazon Web Services about disrupting HPC
(a market where they have almost zero presence) and talks from Red Hat
about disrupting automotive tech (same).  It's all aspirational bullshit
that outside sales executives need to justify their jobs.

Anyway, if you're interested in porting to the i.MX8M hardware, but
don't have the resources to buy a MNT Reform, this device would probably
be a good starting point:

https://coral.ai/products/dev-board

khm

Re: [9front] 19,21 ARM Dev Summit and porting to Solid-Run hardware

[v]

Quoth Kurt H Maier <khm@sciops.net>:
> I know a couple of
> us have i.MXM8MQ devices, but ARM ports in general suck because there
> is no standardization.

Pardon my French.  The MNT Reform (laptop of legacy standard parts) looks *shit*.

=> https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2020-11-27-reform-production-update-nov-2020.html MNT Reform Laptop

Thank you for the pointer to the dev board, I can afford.

=> https://coral.ai/products/dev-board i.MX8M cheaper alternative to iMXM8MQ

What you say about industry practices is true from your point of view.  Maybe the 99% is invisible to you and the people in the small niches you know of.  I understand the Fujitsu Fugaku Arm chip tops HPC for now.  I know Tesla uses Red Hat, NASA and others use AWS, and you can't say Tesla has not transformed autotech.

For me a happy outcome would be to score resources from ARM and Solid-Run for 9front devs to work on, charming the marketing execs and their aspirated visions for the future we all want to have is fine by me.

Best,

-- 
v
9SDF Public Access Plan 9 System

Re: [9front] 19,21 ARM Dev Summit and porting to Solid-Run hardware

[hiro]

> What you say about industry practices is true from your point of view.

ok.

> Maybe the 99% is invisible to you and the people in the small niches you
> know of.

99% of what? what are you talking about?
you mean HPC is a small niche? not saying it is not, just trying to
clarify your opinion here.

> I understand the Fujitsu Fugaku Arm chip tops HPC for now.

You mean any good HPC can only be done cheaply/efficiently on "Fujitsu
Fugaku" platform? I have not been informed of this development, what
is the source of your claim? or do i misunderstand?


> I know

...from your point of view.

> Tesla uses Red Hat

in what way are they using red hat. is red hat working for them for
free? is there something irregular about their customer relationship?
red hat has many customers, why is it important whether tesla is one
of them, would it make any difference to HPC if tesla used microsoft
software to confuse the moon with the truck?

>, NASA and others use AWS
why does it matter that NASA uses AWS? we already know that somebody
clearly uses AWS, the more significant number would be the amount of
dollars of AWS revenue. i bet your point is that AWS makes money.

> and you can't say Tesla has not
> transformed autotech.

tesla certainly has not transformed anything relevant, apart from
those cop cars that it flattened bec. it's shitty optical pattern
recognition cannot detect the warning lights.

> For me a happy outcome would be to score resources from ARM and Solid-Run
> for 9front devs to work on, charming the marketing execs and their aspirated
> visions for the future we all want to have is fine by me.

i don't think there's anything those marketing execs can do about
increasing their shitty company's lack of documention.

the main developers have enough funds to buy a shitty arm cpu out of
their pocket money. again, the problem here is not the lack of
hardware or lack of money, it's the lack of documentation.

but go ahead and contact solid-run and explain that to them if you
like. if successful we will be very glad.

if you like to reverse-engineer things, feel free. but keep in mind
how much effort it was for the rpi, and that was barely worth it, only
the rpi4 manages to provide it's basic function, sometimes.

greetings

Re: [9front] 19,21 ARM Dev Summit and porting to Solid-Run hardware

[Kurt H Maier]

On Sun, Oct 10, 2021 at 07:56:36PM +1100, v@9p.sdf.org wrote:
> Quoth Kurt H Maier <khm@sciops.net>:
> > I know a couple of
> > us have i.MXM8MQ devices, but ARM ports in general suck because there
> > is no standardization.
> 
> Pardon my French.  The MNT Reform (laptop of legacy standard parts) looks *shit*.

Not all of us are stupid enough to judge a laptop by what ports it has
built in.

> What you say about industry practices is true from your point of view.  Maybe the 99% is invisible to you and the people in the small niches you know of.  I understand the Fujitsu Fugaku Arm chip tops HPC for now.  I know Tesla uses Red Hat, NASA and others use AWS, and you can't say Tesla has not transformed autotech.

ARM can succeed in HPC because there are enough resources to custom-port
a linux distro to the specific board used in the cluster.  This is
feasible when there are tens of thousands of identical compute nodes,
as in the K computer, and not feasible when there are a shitload of
slightly-different disposable devices, which is the rest of the ARM
platform.  Pick a random ARM device in the wild, and maybe a few hundred
people are interested in running Linux on it.  Somewhere between one and
zero people want to run Plan 9.  There's just no return on that sweat
investment.

"NASA uses AWS" is not the same thing as "NASA uses AWS for HPC."
Everybody uses AWS and Azure for little things, because Microsoft and
Amazon are so desperate for clients that they'll give resources away
just for the opportunity.  But in the end, NASA still has supercomputers
on-prem in Goddard and Ames, and that's where the science happens.
Visualization webshit is a great candidate for AWS.

And I can absolutely say Tesla has not transformed auto tech.  Nobody
else is coming anywhere close to making the mistakes Tesla makes.  And
anyway, the recall from journald filling up the NAND flash was to
replace an Intel board.  Maybe they use ARM on the giant iPad glued to
the dashboard?  Maybe they can use that Coral dev board to do some
computer vision and finally do something about their massive panel gaps.

> For me a happy outcome would be to score resources from ARM and Solid-Run for 9front devs to work on, charming the marketing execs and their aspirated visions for the future we all want to have is fine by me.

ARM can provide nothing to 9front.  They're an IP holding company with
nothing useful to contribute to any computing project except, possibly,
money.  SolidRun is just another ARM OEM, suffering from the same
ridiculous problems that the rest of its market space does.  I don't
know what "resources" you think they can provide, but I hope you won't
ask for any on our behalf, because nothing good ever came of a corporate
sponsor.

khm