Comment by zxcmx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zxcmx | Hacker News Reader

This is super awesome and fun but personally I had to migrate my micro datacenter from pis to nucs.

The "armhf tax" is that you tend to have to build your own images for stuff :( Then you need your own build infra (or "heath robinson" qemu builds) because pis run out of memory building a lot of stuff... but mainly if C++ is involved so ymmv.

That said, I got a rack of 8 pis doing nothing right now, so...

(unrelated http://www.bitscope.com/product/BB04/ is handy if you want to rack a lotta pis, not affliated...)

There is probably a micro business for someone running a slick docker build system for armhf handling the qemu emulation or toolchain dirtiness "under the hood" in the cloud somewhere, on x86-64 boxes with a lot more than 1GB of RAM.

You could try running a Raspberry but add a Network Block device from another machine and. (xNBD: https://bitbucket.org/hirofuchi/xnbd/wiki/Home )

Then export a RAM disk from that machine and add the NBD disk as swap on the Raspberry. It would be slow, but builds would complete. Then you'd need only one low-to-moderate power machine (a PC presumably) in your Raspberry cluster, just with lots of RAM in the one PC.

Scaleway has a good array of ARM cloud offerings: https://www.scaleway.com/armv8-cloud-servers/

Could this work for speeding up builds of ARM images and then deploying locally?

Packet.net can go one further - take those 8 cores and upgrade to 96 cores and 120GB RAM.. it's ARMv8 which will be next for OpenFaaS when the Docker support catches up :-)

Can you elaborate on your NUC setup? Which NUC did you choose?

I have a similar RPI rack collecting dust for the same reason, hence the question.

I've built ABS (archlinux) packages by having some swap space on my pogoplug mobile's boot drive (1TB USB). It's a slog, but stuff will finish sooner or later, and by that I mean later or really late.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I'd like to see if going from the RPI's USB3->SATA adapter->M.2 adapter->16GB of Optane ($40+tax locally) would work, and if it did work (a big if), what performance is like.

Edit - Scratch that, I just remembered the Pi 3 is still USB 2.

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