Lionel Élie Mamane dijo [Tue, Mar 21, 2023 at 02:04:55AM +0100]:
> The Raspberrys have to me a reputation of being small cheap "slower"
> hackable mini-computers, not "workhorses". Have they scaled up that
> much since they were introduced?
No.
They scaled up quite a bit; I would not dare do this same experiment
on a RPi0 or 1 (armel)... But still, they are far, far apart from
other ARM systems.
This discussion prompted me to make this into a blog post:
https://gwolf.org/2023/03/impact-of-parallelism-and-processor-architecture-while-building-a-kernel.html?
> Is even the Raspberry Pi 4 even close to 'a beefy but quiet desktop
> that won't shy away from compiling e.g. LibreOffice'? I don't know
> what hardware it runs, but the buildd for arm64 took 17 hours to build
> LibreOffice
> https://buildd.debian.org/status/logs.php?pkg=libreoffice&ver=4%3A7.4.5-2&arch=arm64
> and from https://db.debian.org/machines.cgi
> the hardware seems to be sponsored by Ampere Computing, so maybe it
> uses one of their CPUs?
My main personal laptop nowadays is an ARM machine; you can see that
with "-j 8" I built a Linux kernel in ~25.5 minutes (and ~100 minutes
with no parallelization). The Raspberry achieved ~101 minutes with its
four cores working towards the build. A decently-new and
decently-beefy small server my workplace bought in early 2021 got 21.5
minutes single-core and got down to less than three minutes when
building with its 8 cores, hyperthreading enabled (so "-j 16").
> Also, I'm worried about the memory. My current desktop has as 8.7GB to
> 10GB memory used when running "nothing in particular", no compilation,
> just Exim4 (+ bayesian spam filtering software when an email comes
> in), XFCE, Firefox, Emacs, terminal emulator / shell windows, mutt and
> a few instant messaging clients. And a Raspberry Pi 4 tops at 8GB?
Keep in mind a great part of that memory can be mapped but not active
— mapped libraries and executables, or even data that's sent "down" to
virtual memory. Not all of it hurts. FWIW, my previous machine at home
had 12GB, and I switched for a 8GB system with a newer SSD. It feels
much better.
> Or are you saying I should run that as a silent "terminal" to SSH into
> my real work machine? Which begs the question of what the work machine
> would be :)
>
> And any idea for a laptop?
There are several decently supported ARM laptops -- however, not
everybody has the same definition of decency.
I'm very happy with the performance of my C630. I bought it
second-hand for US$300 (IIRC it started roughly at twice that price in
2019); I installed with a _modified_ Debian installer¹; it requires
several bits of firmware that it "borrows" from the Windows
installation, and several bits of hardware are not supported (i.e. I
have two sets of kernels, one that's mainline and works "mostly fine"
and IIRC even has audio support, but does not support external video,
and one that carries some patches to enable external video; given I
use this laptop to teach my classes, I almost always use this patched
kernel).
Nowadays, many people report good support with Lenovo's high-range ARM
system, the Thinkpad X13S. I'd jump for mine if I wanted to buy a
>US$1500 laptop (which I don't, of course!)
Good luck switching over to ARM! 😉
¹ https://github.com/aarch64-laptops/debian-cdimage
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