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AWS offers Graviton instances in a bare-metal way too, so you can see for yourself what the SoC offers. It's quite clean, there is a Designware PCIe filtering q

AWS offers Graviton instances in a bare-metal way too, so you can see for yourself what the SoC offers. It's quite clean, there is a Designware PCIe filtering quirk (same as on e.g. the Marvell Armada8k) but other than that it's SBSA-style UEFI+ACPI. Very standard system. In terms of firmware openness, yeah, you don't get the firmware source, but you don't get to touch the machines physically either so you wouldn't have a chance to run a custom build anyway :D (While Ampere Altras are supported by upstream EDK2, have fun)

tjoff 5y ago
>AWS offers Graviton instances in a bare-metal way too, so you can see for yourself what the SoC offers. Oh, we should be so grateful... Or perhaps be happy with what we got and not sacrifice everything for some very short term 5% benefits?
- floatboth 5y ago
  How exactly do you sacrifice ANYTHING compared to any other VPS rental?!
  - tjoff 5y ago
    By supporting closed ecosystems designed to take away power from you? Take one guess.
    - floatboth 5y ago
      What closed ecosystem? Nothing becomes any more closed if you switch the ISA of the CPU used in your VPS to aarch64. The only closed ecosystem here is AWS itself, but what takes power away from you is using non-EC2 services like DynamoDB. In fact the Arm ecosystem is way more open, because there are SoCs that can run completely blob-free firmware (e.g. from Marvell), which is just not happening with any modern Intel/AMD system.
      - tjoff 5y ago
        Hardware. A firmware-blob is nothing in comparison for the vast majority of cases.
Nullabillity 5y ago
Where do you buy Graviton CPUs or systems, then? Their official website[0] only seems to mention renting them on their premises. [0]: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/
- floatboth 5y ago
  I did just say that "you don't get to touch the machines physically either". What does being able to buy them have to do with.. anything? The concept of renting a VM is not new. The introduction of processors that a VM hosting company designs exclusively for use on that service is, and the comments in the thread above seem to imply a fear of this causing some kind of lock-in or whatever. What I'm saying is, this is completely unfounded fear. Graviton instances are very much standard machines and you can run the exact same OS images on there as you can on an Altra or a HoneyComb LX2K or a MACCHIATObin. (Yeah, the OS needs a driver for Amazon's network card, but mainline Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD have that.)

tjoff 5y ago

>AWS offers Graviton instances in a bare-metal way too, so you can see for yourself what the SoC offers. Oh, we should be so grateful... Or perhaps be happy with what we got and not sacrifice everything for some very short term 5% benefits?

floatboth 5y ago
How exactly do you sacrifice ANYTHING compared to any other VPS rental?!
- tjoff 5y ago
  By supporting closed ecosystems designed to take away power from you? Take one guess.
  - floatboth 5y ago
    What closed ecosystem? Nothing becomes any more closed if you switch the ISA of the CPU used in your VPS to aarch64. The only closed ecosystem here is AWS itself, but what takes power away from you is using non-EC2 services like DynamoDB. In fact the Arm ecosystem is way more open, because there are SoCs that can run completely blob-free firmware (e.g. from Marvell), which is just not happening with any modern Intel/AMD system.
    - tjoff 5y ago
      Hardware. A firmware-blob is nothing in comparison for the vast majority of cases.

Nullabillity 5y ago

Where do you buy Graviton CPUs or systems, then? Their official website[0] only seems to mention renting them on their premises. [0]: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/

floatboth 5y ago
I did just say that "you don't get to touch the machines physically either". What does being able to buy them have to do with.. anything? The concept of renting a VM is not new. The introduction of processors that a VM hosting company designs exclusively for use on that service is, and the comments in the thread above seem to imply a fear of this causing some kind of lock-in or whatever. What I'm saying is, this is completely unfounded fear. Graviton instances are very much standard machines and you can run the exact same OS images on there as you can on an Altra or a HoneyComb LX2K or a MACCHIATObin. (Yeah, the OS needs a driver for Amazon's network card, but mainline Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD have that.)