10 ms·

Raspberry Pi on Raspberry Pi

153 points by KirinDave 7y ago

ChuckMcM 7y ago
netboot on the Pi 4 is only going to be added in a future firmware update. Netboot is critical to the operation of our cloud, as it prevents customers from bricking the servers. Our dreams were shattered. This is unfortunate, its something I use a lot. Guess I'll wait to get a Pi4.
- KirinDave 7y ago
  The big news is that from a hardware perspective netboot is possible. That has not always been the case.
  - stedaniels 7y ago
    But has been the case since the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B IIRC.
    - KirinDave 7y ago
      Yeah, we just had to wait for firmware.
- TD-Linux 7y ago
  I wonder if they could have used something like petitboot? That way they don't depend on Pi4 firmware for netbooting. It does require a sd card, but it's read only and tiny.
  - grafelic 7y ago
    There is also iPXE, where a solution would be to use a small ipxe iso/lkrn and combine it with a boot loader written to a sd and then bootstrap the system over the network from there. http://ipxe.org/appnote/buildtargets http://ipxe.org/appnote/buildtargets
tracker1 7y ago
Wonder how K8s would do on the 4GB RPi models... With a netboot controller, even better I'd suspect.
- geerlingguy 7y ago
  I've been running a K8s on the 3B+ for over a year and it works, just barely (http://pidramble.com http://pidramble.com). The one major constraint, and almost always the cause of control plane outages, was the 1 GB of RAM on the master. Now that I can get a Pi with 4 GB I think it will be a lot more resilient! Note that the other Pis did just fine running typical workloads, as long as I kept the overall deployment memory constraints in check.
  - tracker1 7y ago
    That seems to be the general complaint... running K8s on less than 1GB ram seems to be unmanageable for the most part... with the new models, it might actually be a good idea to try a few clusters of these.
bsder 7y ago
The real question is: Can I buy the chips? Can I get the technical documentation? If I can't build my own RPi in volume, this is STILL a problem.
- LeoPanthera 7y ago
  > If I can't build my own RPi in volume, this is STILL a problem. For who?
  - bsder 7y ago
    Anybody trying to build a real product as opposed to a toy. If I want to deliver a quarter million of these I can't.
    - rhinoceraptor 7y ago
      If you're building a real product, don't use hardware meant for education and tinkering.
      - CamperBob2 7y ago
        Easy to say, but the reality is that you will be destroyed (or at least threatened) in the marketplace by your competitor who paid 1/4 what you did for an SBC.
        rhinoceraptor 7y ago
        If you're actually deploying 250,000 SBCs, I would imagine you could do a lot better than $35 a piece.
        CamperBob2 7y ago
        You might be surprised. Remember that boards like the RPi are either loss leaders for the SoC vendor, or a way to offload excess capacity. Their pricing does not necessarily reflect what an actual customer for an actual SBC product will pay, regardless of scale.
pathartl 7y ago
I get that they're using the Pi in a production environment for small-sized-discrete-hardware hosting, but given the nature of the Pi and it's community, the tone of this article is confusing to me. The Pi is great for things like DIY HTPC's, kiosk displays, IoT controllers, education, etc... but using it how this service is using it seems wrong--or misused--for some reason. I feel like an offensive stance is being taken against the Pi 4 for not being client production ready, when it seems like the foundation's attitude is if you want to go full client production, use the compute module.
- Florin_Andrei 7y ago
  I don't think there's a right and a wrong way to use it. If it works, it works. If it's powerful enough to run a website - by all means, use it.
- m463 7y ago
  Isn't it a cellphone chip being misused for DIY HTPC's, kiosk displays, IoT controllers, education, etc... :) More seriously, perf per watt is king in datacenters, no matter what the source.
  - detaro 7y ago
    If I remember correctly, it's originally a chip for set-top boxes.
    - w0mbat 7y ago
      The original purpose of the original ARM chip was to drive the Acorn Archimedes desktop computer. While they were aiming to design a power efficient device, the power consumption accidentally turned out to be far lower than intended, which has been a big reason for ARM's continued success in many uses.
      - w0mbat 7y ago
        The team's design goal was 1 watt, but the chip ended up needing only a tenth of a watt. In fact on the original testbed they forgot to wire up the power lines to the chip, but the processor still worked, appearing to be running on no power at all! It turned out that it needed so little power that it could run on just the leakage from the data lines. https://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_of_tech_arm_creators_sophie_wilson_and_steve_furber/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes...
linguae 7y ago
Something that just dawned on me is how far we have come regarding the compute resources that are available to the average person living in the developed world. Consider the hardware that Larry Page and Sergey Brin used to start Google in 1998. According to this page (https://blog.codinghorror.com/google-hardware-circa-1999/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/google-hardware-circa-1999/), they had 10 processor cores running at speeds of 200-333MHz, 1.7GB RAM, and 366GB of distributed hard disk storage. This configuration probably cost them a minimum of $10,000 to build, probably more. Now consider the Raspberry Pi 4. If one spends $45 on the 2GB RAM variant and additional money for a 512 GB drive, then for roughly $100 he or she would have the same compute and storage resources that Larry Page and Sergey Brin had in 1998 that started one of the world's most successful Web companies. In fact, our smartphones can drive 1998-era Google if configured with enough storage. From a software standpoint, imagine the possibilities of millions of people walking around with devices that are as powerful as the compute resources Google had in 1998. It's realizations such as this that make me excited What I love about the Raspberry Pi is the possibilities it brings at affordable prices. For example, students learning about how distributed systems work can build a cluster of Raspberry Pis for just a few hundred dollars. They have access to the same open source software that major tech companies use for their infrastructure, like Linux and various distributed software projects such as Apache Spark. In an age where sometimes I'm cynical about the direction of tech and our industry, it's realizations such as this and product announcements like this new Raspberry Pi that make me remember why I love computing.
- W-Stool 7y ago
  Consider the Cray-1 supercomputer of the early 1980s - 100 MFLOPS for US$10M. A modern Intel processor will do 100 GFLOPS (1000x faster) for a couple of hundred bucks.
  - vardump 7y ago
    > A modern Intel processor will do 100 GFLOPS (1000x faster) for a couple of hundred bucks. Yes. A slight correction, though: 100 GFLOPS per CPU core. Some new server Xeons can do 64 single precision FLOPS per cycle per core. Most other modern x86 CPUs can do up to 32 SP FLOPS per cycle per core. AFAIK, RPi4's Cortex A72 will have to do with just 8 FLOPS/cycle/core. Similar to original Intel Core, Nehalem and Penryn. FPU wise (and probably otherwise as well), per clock cycle, RPi4 is not far from the famous Core 2 Quad Q6600. :-) Or one Cortex A72 core @1.5 GHz has comparable floating point performance as a hypothetical Pentium 4 at 6 GHz. (These figures count one FPU multiply-add as two FLOPS, but that seems to be industry standard way...)

153 points by KirinDave 7y ago

netboot on the Pi 4 is only going to be added in a future firmware update. Netboot is critical to the operation of our cloud, as it prevents customers from bricking the servers. Our dreams were shattered. This is unfortunate, its something I use a lot. Guess I'll wait to get a Pi4.

KirinDave 7y ago
The big news is that from a hardware perspective netboot is possible. That has not always been the case.
- stedaniels 7y ago
  But has been the case since the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B IIRC.
  - KirinDave 7y ago
    Yeah, we just had to wait for firmware.
TD-Linux 7y ago
I wonder if they could have used something like petitboot? That way they don't depend on Pi4 firmware for netbooting. It does require a sd card, but it's read only and tiny.
- grafelic 7y ago
  There is also iPXE, where a solution would be to use a small ipxe iso/lkrn and combine it with a boot loader written to a sd and then bootstrap the system over the network from there. http://ipxe.org/appnote/buildtargets http://ipxe.org/appnote/buildtargets

tracker1 7y ago

Wonder how K8s would do on the 4GB RPi models... With a netboot controller, even better I'd suspect.

geerlingguy 7y ago
I've been running a K8s on the 3B+ for over a year and it works, just barely (http://pidramble.com http://pidramble.com). The one major constraint, and almost always the cause of control plane outages, was the 1 GB of RAM on the master. Now that I can get a Pi with 4 GB I think it will be a lot more resilient! Note that the other Pis did just fine running typical workloads, as long as I kept the overall deployment memory constraints in check.
- tracker1 7y ago
  That seems to be the general complaint... running K8s on less than 1GB ram seems to be unmanageable for the most part... with the new models, it might actually be a good idea to try a few clusters of these.

bsder 7y ago

The real question is: Can I buy the chips? Can I get the technical documentation? If I can't build my own RPi in volume, this is STILL a problem.

LeoPanthera 7y ago
> If I can't build my own RPi in volume, this is STILL a problem. For who?
- bsder 7y ago
  Anybody trying to build a real product as opposed to a toy. If I want to deliver a quarter million of these I can't.
  - rhinoceraptor 7y ago
    If you're building a real product, don't use hardware meant for education and tinkering.
    - CamperBob2 7y ago
      Easy to say, but the reality is that you will be destroyed (or at least threatened) in the marketplace by your competitor who paid 1/4 what you did for an SBC.
      - rhinoceraptor 7y ago
        If you're actually deploying 250,000 SBCs, I would imagine you could do a lot better than $35 a piece.
        CamperBob2 7y ago
        You might be surprised. Remember that boards like the RPi are either loss leaders for the SoC vendor, or a way to offload excess capacity. Their pricing does not necessarily reflect what an actual customer for an actual SBC product will pay, regardless of scale.

pathartl 7y ago

I get that they're using the Pi in a production environment for small-sized-discrete-hardware hosting, but given the nature of the Pi and it's community, the tone of this article is confusing to me. The Pi is great for things like DIY HTPC's, kiosk displays, IoT controllers, education, etc... but using it how this service is using it seems wrong--or misused--for some reason. I feel like an offensive stance is being taken against the Pi 4 for not being client production ready, when it seems like the foundation's attitude is if you want to go full client production, use the compute module.

Florin_Andrei 7y ago
I don't think there's a right and a wrong way to use it. If it works, it works. If it's powerful enough to run a website - by all means, use it.
m463 7y ago
Isn't it a cellphone chip being misused for DIY HTPC's, kiosk displays, IoT controllers, education, etc... :) More seriously, perf per watt is king in datacenters, no matter what the source.
- detaro 7y ago
  If I remember correctly, it's originally a chip for set-top boxes.
  - w0mbat 7y ago
    The original purpose of the original ARM chip was to drive the Acorn Archimedes desktop computer. While they were aiming to design a power efficient device, the power consumption accidentally turned out to be far lower than intended, which has been a big reason for ARM's continued success in many uses.
    - w0mbat 7y ago
      The team's design goal was 1 watt, but the chip ended up needing only a tenth of a watt. In fact on the original testbed they forgot to wire up the power lines to the chip, but the processor still worked, appearing to be running on no power at all! It turned out that it needed so little power that it could run on just the leakage from the data lines. https://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_of_tech_arm_creators_sophie_wilson_and_steve_furber/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes...

linguae 7y ago

Something that just dawned on me is how far we have come regarding the compute resources that are available to the average person living in the developed world. Consider the hardware that Larry Page and Sergey Brin used to start Google in 1998. According to this page (https://blog.codinghorror.com/google-hardware-circa-1999/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/google-hardware-circa-1999/), they had 10 processor cores running at speeds of 200-333MHz, 1.7GB RAM, and 366GB of distributed hard disk storage. This configuration probably cost them a minimum of $10,000 to build, probably more. Now consider the Raspberry Pi 4. If one spends $45 on the 2GB RAM variant and additional money for a 512 GB drive, then for roughly $100 he or she would have the same compute and storage resources that Larry Page and Sergey Brin had in 1998 that started one of the world's most successful Web companies. In fact, our smartphones can drive 1998-era Google if configured with enough storage. From a software standpoint, imagine the possibilities of millions of people walking around with devices that are as powerful as the compute resources Google had in 1998. It's realizations such as this that make me excited What I love about the Raspberry Pi is the possibilities it brings at affordable prices. For example, students learning about how distributed systems work can build a cluster of Raspberry Pis for just a few hundred dollars. They have access to the same open source software that major tech companies use for their infrastructure, like Linux and various distributed software projects such as Apache Spark. In an age where sometimes I'm cynical about the direction of tech and our industry, it's realizations such as this and product announcements like this new Raspberry Pi that make me remember why I love computing.

W-Stool 7y ago
Consider the Cray-1 supercomputer of the early 1980s - 100 MFLOPS for US$10M. A modern Intel processor will do 100 GFLOPS (1000x faster) for a couple of hundred bucks.
- vardump 7y ago
  > A modern Intel processor will do 100 GFLOPS (1000x faster) for a couple of hundred bucks. Yes. A slight correction, though: 100 GFLOPS per CPU core. Some new server Xeons can do 64 single precision FLOPS per cycle per core. Most other modern x86 CPUs can do up to 32 SP FLOPS per cycle per core. AFAIK, RPi4's Cortex A72 will have to do with just 8 FLOPS/cycle/core. Similar to original Intel Core, Nehalem and Penryn. FPU wise (and probably otherwise as well), per clock cycle, RPi4 is not far from the famous Core 2 Quad Q6600. :-) Or one Cortex A72 core @1.5 GHz has comparable floating point performance as a hypothetical Pentium 4 at 6 GHz. (These figures count one FPU multiply-add as two FLOPS, but that seems to be industry standard way...)