Finally have an excuse

[SemaphoreSlim]

…to build out a monster.

Thanks to a customer’s port request, we got our hands on a Gigabyte R281-T94. We are going to build it out using Xen and Ubuntu for now, but eventually we may run OpenBSD client doms under Xen.

I watched Wendell’s videos. This is gonna be fun.

We’ll keep you posted as we go.

[SemaphoreSlim]

… as per previous.

These are expensive, but working on this after developing for Renesas 16- and 32-bit µCs for the last decade is like learning orthodontia to help you carve Mt. Rushmore.

We have the basic boot up and running, but customer requirements are that we run bare-metal in Xen and the other functionality all be in other doms under Xen, so that’s what we’re working on now. Ultimately, we’d want to be able to run under Xen with minimal boot and no other OS except the customer’s code in dom0. We’ll see if we can make this work. Stay tuned.

The practical side of this work is otherwise mundane to those of you who run cloud or enterprise systems, so I won’t go into a lot of detail except to say that we now at least have (we think) a working UEFI driver with which to run the old GPU card I want to use as a GPGPU.

Gigabyte has announced that they are working on a GPU project for this system; since they build their own very capable cards I’d assume this is true and probably coming soon.

Oh, well. Time to pick up the old screwdriver and get back to rack building with my team…

Cheers all

~Sam

[SemaphoreSlim]

OK, so - it’s been a long time since I posted anything.

Best laid plans and all that, so - instead of Xen, we’re using BHyve. It turned out to be much easier to set up. But the customer said they want Xen, so… ultimately we’ll have to do it. I’ll update the thread when I can.

I do not have customer code in the 0 partition yet, but we at least have a Ubuntu Server LTS in the 0 partition and the customer’s code in partition 1.

Today, finally got the power cable from Gigabyte that lets me bring up my Radeon R9 290X card to use as a GPGPU.

I have an official UEFI GOP driver for AArch64, which we will be loading and connecting to the customer’s code so we can use the card for vector math. This should be fun.

Sorry this is so slow to trickle out, but… This is unfortunately only one of 3 projects currently demanding my attention.

Well, back to work.

As Tonio K. once said, that’s life in the foodchain.