raspberry-pi-dramble VS RPi4

Automate the Pi Dramble website I run in my basement with Drupal Pi.

How is latency and stuff? Any slowness that you wouldn't expect from the software that may come from running it on a rpi4? I've been thinking of setting up a few services, but I kinda want to do something like the Pi Dramble, wasn't even aware that a single pi would have the power to run all of these services. Though I'm not actually surprised it does.

I see this kind of question asked a lot when people are posting their Kubernetes Pi clusters. The rpi 4 quad core with 4-8GB RAM gives a lot of potential for the price in a kuberenetes setup I feel. I found the pi dramble project interesting, and even more the turing pi using rpi compute modules. Are NUCs really a cheaper alternative for a kubernetes cluster, every time I start try to come up with something I end up with a far more expensive setup and fewer cores. Any hints on viable setups, e.g. replacing 4x POE powered RPI 4's.?

My setup is exactly the same as the top photo on https://www.pidramble.com just with the stack'o'pi zip-tied to the switch so I can move it around without the things sliding around.

Another question: is that MB/sec or MiB/sec? Note that the 400 MiB/sec benchmark is 420 MB/sec.

Not a _huge_ difference, but it is a difference ;)

The other major difference is anything non-sequential, especially things like 4K reads. This is where the PCIe->USB->SATA (or PCIe->USB->NVMe) adapter overhead really slows things down.

Try out my benchmark script and see how it fares: https://github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-dramble/blob/mas...

(Thank the marketers for making everything confusing with MiB and MB...)

are you using the uefi firmware from https://github.com/pftf/RPi4 or are you trying to boot through the gpio serial header?I don't think the pi can boot on its own through uboot unless your using a serial/usb connection

The rpi4 has uefi firmware available, this allows you to boot any generic uefi aarch64 image, you no longer need rpi specific images.

https://github.com/pftf/RPi4

Straight out of the box, the image wouldn't boot, said that start.elf was invalid, so I went to https://github.com/pftf/RPi4/releases as suggested in the Readme.md file in the EFI partition. I installed that (version 1.34) over the existing EFI partition and tried again. That booted up the kernel, but it apparently died when it enabled the interrupt controller. The last messages are about armgic0.

I'm guessing these are not SystemReady certified with UEFI firmware and require "bespoke" preinstalled arm images?

https://www.arm.com/architecture/system-architectures/system...

https://developer.arm.com/documentation/102677/0100/UEFI-req...

I have three SystemReady arm devices and it's pretty awesome to be able to just boot an aarch64 live ISO and install. The experience is the same for running vms via ESXi arm edition.

Nvidia Jetson AGX Xavier - https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/downloads#?search=uefi

Honeycomb LX2 - https://github.com/SolidRun/lx2160a_uefi

RPI4 - https://github.com/pftf/RPi4

It can be tedious building/provisioning the firmware but once complete they are ready for any aarch64 uefi iso.

What is annoying however is when distros don't ship an aarch64 uefi iso - but instead choose to build a zillion device specific "preinstalled" arm images. (looking at you manjaro)

The list of supported devices for ESXi arm edition is a great place to start for identifying options and is constantly updated.

https://flings.vmware.com/esxi-arm-edition

  Raspberry-Pi-4

The only reason why I am was trying to build the image was because I wanted to move stuff as mainline as possible and was worried that any installation made with the help of RPi4 UEFI firmware would stop booting after a while.

Most ARM hardware is cellphones, raspberry pi and the Mac M1, which certainly aren't that type.

But a lot of ARM hardware is that type. The keywords are SBSA / SBBR / SystemReady. If your hardware is SBBR compatible then Fedora and Ubuntu's ARM64 iso, and Windows ARM64, downloaded from their website, will at least boot fine (drivers are a different question as always).

There's a good list of supported hardware in the lower half of https://community.arm.com/arm-community-blogs/b/architecture... . Many systems from Avantek, Gigabyte, NXP, Marvell, Solidrun etc are standardizing on this way of booting.

DeviceTree is low-level enough that you can implement UEFI on top of it. There's a UEFI port for the Raspberry Pi 4 at https://rpi4-uefi.dev/ that produces an SBBR layer, allowing it to boot any off-the-shelf ARM64 SBBR distro.

"Alternatively the system can be booted using UEFI firmware found at https://github.com/pftf/RPi4. Follow their instructions to install to an SD card and run the OpenBSD installer from USB. v1.21 is known to work; some newer versions may have problems."

After you have installed the system. Remove the SD card and copy over the RPI UEFI firmware v1.31 to the 17 meg MSDOS partition. You can now boot the SD card in the rpi without the USB stick.

UEFI on RPi 4: https://github.com/pftf/RPi4/releases

Projects like Tow-Boot, a distribution of U-Boot, provide a nice boot menu and allow you to boot the "generic ARM" ISOs that are usually just UEFI. On the Raspberry Pi 3 and 4, you can put Tianocore EDK2 onto the SD card and boot any UEFI image, including Windows 10 or 11 for ARM.