On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 07:31:20PM +0100, luke.leighton wrote:
On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 5:02 PM, Richard W.M. Jones rjones@redhat.com wrote:
On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 02:30:15PM +0100, luke.leighton wrote:
i posted this to the debian-arm list but it occurred to me that you guys might appreciate having a decent desktop-style system as well as something with enough RAM to do compiles of some of the larger packages without needing to run into swap space, as well.
joe (posting on arm-netbooks) has managed to get a sub-17-second boot to desktop out of the A20 when it's matched with 1gbyte 800mhz DDR3 RAM and a decent SATA SSD: now imagine what happens when that's 2gbyte 1333mhz DDR3 RAM :)
I was looking at the A20 a while back. This has a Cortex-A7 -compatible processor, right?
strictly speaking this is the wrong question: it *is* a Cortex A7. if it was "compatible" that would imply that it was some sort of clone, which it's not. allwinner are licensees of ARM cores, including the Cortex A7.
Does it do hardware virtualization,
http://www.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-a/cortex-a7.php
apparently yes. which is pretty amazing.
OK. A bit of background about why I (keep) asking about this:
We're looking for a development platform on which people can do KVM, libvirt, virt-*, libguestfs, etc.
The criteria are basically:
- cheap
- available to purchase now in many countries
- ordinary human beings can install Fedora & make KVM work
The Samsung Chromebook is kinda the default now. It's not especially cheap, although not too expensive. However the main problem is that HYP mode is crippled out of the box, and enabling it can't be done by regular humans.
I'm currently testing the ODROID-XU. Not with any success, it has to be said -- too much peculiar hardware, like uncommon HDMI connectors, homebrew eMMC, and incompatible UART -- I need to visit an electrical shop before I can find out why it's refusing to boot.
I think I'm in a bit of a peculiar position because I care a lot more about having a serial port or a VGA port, than having a powerful GPU.
Rich.