Red Hat Enterprise Linux for ARM Hits General Availability

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Red Hat Enterprise Linux for ARM Hits General Availability

Red Hat now considers their ARM support on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL7) to be supported under general availability "GA" terms...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RHEL-ARM-GA-Milestone

[starshipeleven]

Sigh, no ARM board with UEFI to run this thing is around.

[edwaleni]

Just in time for Qualcomm Centriq.

Runs on HPE Apollo blades.

RHEL also runs on POWER8.

[torsionbar28]

Sigh, no ARM board with UEFI to run this thing is around.

No commodity board anyways. Have to buy a complete ARM server from one of the mentioned vendors. It would be really nice if someone like Supermicro stepped up and created a standard form factor server/workstation grade ARM board that could be used in whitebox builds. It would be a killer solution for small NAS, firewall, and other appliance type devices.

[dwagner]

One would think that manufacturers who intend to promote an all-new server architecture would be interested in making smaller samples of it easily available to prospective customers to test and start to like it. But it seems they've chosen to only target large-scale supercomputer installations. Well, I don't know the exact size of the world-wide supercomputer market, but it's got to be tiny in comparison to the server market as a whole. And they won't conquer the latter without much smaller scale offerings.

But maybe their proclaimed "better performance per price" ratio is true only when compared to the very expensive end of the range computers are sold for.

[torsionbar28]

Well, I don't know the exact size of the world-wide supercomputer market, but it's got to be tiny in comparison to the server market as a whole.

That was true 10 years ago, yes. But these days hadoop and big data has brought supercomputer-like requirements to the standard corporate datacenter. A business may only have one rack full of nodes for their big data needs while a traditional supercomputer (think Los Alamos) is hundreds of racks, but the architecture is very similar - dense commodity nodes with some type of low latency interconnect. Supercomputers are no longer just for science and engineering.

[jabl]

One would think that manufacturers who intend to promote an all-new server architecture would be interested in making smaller samples of it easily available to prospective customers to test and start to like it. But it seems they've chosen to only target large-scale supercomputer installations. Well, I don't know the exact size of the world-wide supercomputer market, but it's got to be tiny in comparison to the server market as a whole. And they won't conquer the latter without much smaller scale offerings.

But maybe their proclaimed "better performance per price" ratio is true only when compared to the very expensive end of the range computers are sold for.

I think the initial main target market is more like "cloud" and appliance stuff (big NAS boxes, network switches etc.) than HPC. There's a couple of aarch64 HPC systems being built, but honestly I think it's more of a kicking the tires, development and evaluation platforms than stuff for "real" work. The real HPC stuff will come later with SVE.

[jabl]

I think the initial main target market is more like "cloud" and appliance stuff (big NAS boxes, network switches etc.) than HPC. There's a couple of aarch64 HPC systems being built, but honestly I think it's more of a kicking the tires, development and evaluation platforms than stuff for "real" work. The real HPC stuff will come later with SVE.

Some info about ARM & HPC: https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/11...ter-thunderx2/

https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/11/13/arm-benchmarks-show-hpc-ripe-processor-shakeup/

[ruff]

Oh, cavium, sounds extremely tasty.