Raspberry Pi on Raspberry Pi

https://blog.mythic-beasts.com/2019/06/22/raspberry-pi-on-raspberry-pi/

by KirinDave • 7 years ago

153 81 7 years ago

ChuckMcM• 7 years 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.

KirinDave4• 7 years ago

The big news is that from a hardware perspective netboot is possible. That has not always been the case.

stedaniels• 7 years ago

But has been the case since the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B IIRC.

TD-Linux• 7 years 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• 7 years 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

tracker12• 7 years ago

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

geerlingguy• 7 years ago

I've been running a K8s on the 3B+ for over a year and it works, just barely (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.

tracker12• 7 years 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.

bsder3• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

If I can't build my own RPi in volume, this is STILL a problem.

For who?

bsder3• 7 years 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.

KirinDave4• 7 years ago

While I agree I'd like more open hardware (And Olimex comes to mind here as a vendor trying to deliver) but the reality is no one truly hits that fully open source benchmark for general purpose SBCs, yet.

This shouldn't disqualify the RPi, in my opinion. We're moving incrementally towards a world of open firmware and open hardware from a totally closed world. It feels like we're making forward progress. We shouldn't punish incremental steps on this path, nor should we stop asking for more open hardware.

bsder3• 7 years ago

As far as I know, the TI-based stuff (Beagle<foo> and others) is all open with the possible exception of the accelerated 3D video driver. I can get volume pricing and delivery dates on all parts. I can get documentation on latencies and functional units.

That's a pretty big difference.

All this means that people serious about a product have to avoid a RaspberryPi, and this is terribly unfortunate because it has such a wonderful community.

m4633• 7 years ago

I too wish you could get pi's in quantity.

For similar systems in quantity, a guy I know used toradex

jdietrich2• 7 years ago

I don't know about your local distributor, but RS Components will sell you as many as you like; they've currently got 47,400 3B+ boards in stock, no maximum order and a price break at full box quantities (150).

ahartmetz• 7 years ago

Toradex modules need just one or two voltages. RPi compute modules need like... five or so? Much extra circuitry. Toradex modules also have availability guarantees. I've seen both reasons rule out RPi compute modules.

tssva• 7 years ago

There are a couple of options available to you. You can use the compute module or contract Element14 to manufacture a customized raspberry pi for you.

But as others have said it is not a problem as far as the Raspberry Pi foundation is concerned because their primary mission isn't to produce a board for use in commercial products.

pathartl• 7 years 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• 7 years 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.

m4633• 7 years 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.

detaro3• 7 years ago

If I remember correctly, it's originally a chip for set-top boxes.

linguae2• 7 years 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/), 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-Stool2• 7 years 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• 7 years 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...)

simonbyrne• 7 years ago

Not to mention a Cray 1 used 115kW: the new raspberry pi uses 7W peak.

Havoc• 7 years ago

Noticing this with cloud capacity too. Employers throws 150 bucks of credit at me and I don’t really use it to even 10% of potential - me learning is the limitation not compute power

AnIdiotOnTheNet2• 7 years ago

On the other hand, look at how ridiculously powerful our computers are and they're still so slow. We've met orders of magnitude more computing power with orders of magnitude slower software.

spacenick88• 7 years ago

I hear this claim almost every day yet its been years since I've actually felt my normal work computers being slow. Hell, even booting an OS in an emulator running in a browser proper software still runs blazingly fast. It's just that some people seem to use an awful lot of terrible software but I don't seem to be one of those people

bigiain3• 7 years ago

I was amused to read this morning that Microsoft's new Terminal client has "GPU accelerated text rendering engine". WT actual F??? You can't run a terminal window without a few Gig of video ram and a couple of teraflops of GPU horsepower??? Boggle!

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/06/24/microsoft_round_up/

JustSomeNobody2• 7 years ago

Because everyone is in a hurry. Productivity is measured in dev hours not CPU hours. This is why we have crap Electron apps.

pizzazzaro• 7 years ago

Thats orders of magnitude of other people's software running for other people on our phones and laptops. If it were just the software we wanted, the adware, ransomware, click-baiting, click-jacking, pop ups, and such wouldnt need yet more software to fight.

The internet might have been a mistake.

mrjasongorman• 7 years ago

Blame abstractions, and the fact that we expect a higher graphical polish to our programs and even just the desktop. Booting a Raspberry Pi straight into terminal is pretty quick.

L_226• 7 years ago

Just like when you have a backpack slightly too big for purpose and you tend to add in useless junk, so too do people add useless software when available compute/memory is superfluous. Because you can.

Raspberry Pi on Raspberry Pi

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