Build your own bare-metal ARM cluster

While the article talks about not being able to run x86 binaries on Arm, this is the real drawback to the platform.

I really wish we would see a standard Arm kernel instruction set come along and get adopted by every manufacturer who isn't doing something unusual enough to justify a custom architecture.

ARM server platforms are moving to adopt standard firmware solutions like UEFI (yes, UEFI sucks in many ways - but A standard is better than what we have now) to start alleviating the device tree madness, just don’t hold your breath on it being mainstream for hobbyist/maker products anytime soon.

There are no stupid questions. Clustering allows you to do more jobs at once than you could do with a single machine of the same power. It allows for redundancy if you set things up in such a way that if one hardware components fails another takes over. It can allow for better isolation between processes for security reasons than what a process isolated from another process on the same machine can give you. And many other reasons besides, so clustering is a technique that can give you many different benefits.

But...

There is a price to pay. Clustering isn't easy, convenient or without overhead. As soon as you cross the boundaries of what a single machine can give everything suddenly has a price, either in terms of latency, throughput, complexity or loss of control. Clustering software tries to hide some of this but under the hood these will always be there.

Here are some good hints about what limitations you are operating under no matter how good your distributed environment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_compu...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law

You can also try ExaGear. (I've never used it.)

https://eltechs.com/product/exagear-desktop/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15018992

Surely that does not qualify as "running the binaries" if you emulate another arch! I mean if you want to be nitpicky, yes, you're running them, but that is not what most people think when saying that.

(Disclaimer: I'm from Rancher Labs)

Unfortunately, none of the tech referenced in this articled is available yet and should be released end of February. There is a more interesting part that isn't referenced in this article and the is that we'll have two variants of k8s for ARM. One is RKE which is our CNCF certified k8s distribution. The other will be based off k3s (github.com/ibuildthecloud/k3s) which is an optimized k8s distribution for small clusters (smaller memory, easier setup, etc). I expected the second will be far more suited for something like this project.

I share your sentiment regarding Mosix. I don't think however, that clustering SBCs is of any value beyond the learning experience. Even a moderately powerful laptop is much faster than a *Pi, e.g. a 2013 Chromebook Pixel is about 16 times faster than a Banana Pi, when measured using `openssl speed`.

I found that to be extremely unreliable, I had to reset the Pi a few times before it actually made TFTP requests.

A tiny SDcard with just U-Boot on it, configured to netboot, has been actually reliable.

That assumes that the nature of the work load doesn't change over time.

RK3328: Pine64's ROCK64 comes in 2GB and 4GB of RAM

(also the RK3399 based ROCKPro64 is even more awesome, bigger form factor, but two A72 cores for actually good performance! Oh and some other manufacturers even made RK3399 based RPi-sized boards!)