On Tue, Nov 30, 2021 at 2:19 PM Derek Atkins <derek(a)ihtfp.com> wrote:
On Tue, November 30, 2021 8:53 am, Peter Robinson wrote:
>> I've been using Wandboards, which I've liked, but I discovered that
what
>> I
>> was using just wasn't powerful enough to do what I wanted to do.. So I
>> was looking for replacements for my wandboards. I have a handful of
>> these
>> R1 devices from work, so I've been able to play with them and verify
>> that,
>> yes, it can do what I want and perform much better than the wandboard
>> quad
>> did.
>
> The R1 is based on a Allwinner H3, it's a quad core Cortex-A7, it's
> not really any more powerful than the quad core Wandboard TBH.
Perhaps, but it IS faster/more powerful. Not that you can trust the
"bogomips" results, but the R1 definitely reports a "higher" number
;)
Specifically, the WB reports 6, and the R1 reports 64.
And I was able to get more audio streams through the R1 than the Wandboard
running shairport-sync.
On the other hand, I do need to go verify that I *WAS* running a quad
wandboard for that server; I honestly don't recall now (and the device is
now offline) so I can't quickly check.
>> Let me turn this around; what board (with case) would *YOU* recommend
>> for
>> some small, low-power arm-based server platforms?
>
> I always reply to that with the question what are you doing with them?
> What are your feature requirements? Eth? Dual eth? WiFi, etc.....
I've got three ARM systems deployed right now:
1) DHCP/DNS/Unifi Controller
2) Asterisk
3) My shairport-sync server (~16 streams)
Right now I've got #3 on an R1 with Armbian Buster -- the only
non-RPM-based distro I'm running!
#2 is fine as a wandboard quad. I'm not having issues there.
#1 is running on a Wandboard Quad, which has 2GB RAM. Currently it is
reporting:
[~]# free
total used free shared buff/cache
available
Mem: 2061172 871612 140692 804 1048868
1162612
Swap: 982420 11008 971412
Granted, it works here, but I'd like to "update" from the old version of
Fedora running there onto a newer version, but the main issue is the unifi
controller. The issue was with mongodb-server, where I had to rebuild it
myself to get it to work on the platform. If I'm going to upgrade to F35
on the WB I might need to do that again (unless it will continue to
support mongodb 4.0.3).
Unfortunately there is still not an armhfp build of mongo -- although
there is one for aarch64, so if I stay with that (instead of aarch64) I'll
still have to rebuild mongo again -- so I guess to replace this system I'd
want an aarch64 board with sufficient RAM to run mongo and unifi. I don't
mind using an SD for storage (certainly for mongo). The system currently
uses 6G of storage, which would fill most of the 8G eMMC devices. But I
am concerned about the 1G.
There will never be mongodb for 32 bit, it's architecture doesn't allow it.
Personally 32 bit is basically coming to an end, we're proposing
retiring it from Fedora 37, which means Fedora 36, supported until
June 2023 will be the last release that's supported.
I would probably suggest a Raspberry Pi 4, you can get with up to 8GB
of RAM and they work well now for non graphical applications.
[1]
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/RetireARMv7