16-Core HoneyComb LX2K ARM Workstation Looks To Offer A Decent Performance Oomph

[anarki2]

We've just ordered one with a GT 1030, an NVMe SSD and 8G RAM, can't wait to see how it goes.

[jjmcwill2003]

anarki2 Are you still using your HoneyComb LX2K? What do you think after 2 1/2 years?

Kinda sad that nothing newer has been announced in the same cost/performance segment.

[DanaG]

I'm using mine and I like it, but there are a few quirks with it. Since I got it, I've actually left my Ryzen 3700x server board shut down and powered off most of the time, because the Honeycomb uses less power. Apparently the ARM kernel maintainers have been sitting on important patches for months, though I don't have the links to the various conversation threads.

I wonder if getting a Phoronix article written about the issues would help poke the maintainers a bit? Just make sure it's a polite poke, not an angry one!

Issues:

• Need a patch for ACPI-declared SDHC controller, to allow using the SD card slot and the onboard eMMC
• Memcpy write ordering is messed up on Cortex-A72, causing visual corruption with PCIe GPUs
• Have to set the kernel parameter arm-smmu.disable_bypass=0 (yes, it's a double-negative) to fix a bunch of IOMMU errors
• Need to use restool to enable the SFP+ interfaces. I'm using a copper DAC to connect it to a Zyxel XGS1210-12.

There's a kernel repo that has fixes for a bunch of the things, but the graphics corruption requires patches in libc and/or mesa.

With a patched kernel, IOMMU passthrough works, tested using an LSI SAS controller and an Ubuntu VM. I also tested a Radeon, but that device requires patches for PCIe quirks, and a different version of the UEFI firmware, and the Polaris cards tend to fail at device reset.

For reference, here's a Geekbench (2GHz CPU frequency, DDR4-2600 or -2900, I forgot which): https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/13589597