Adventures with ARM server

I recently got a CubieTruck with a terabyte SSD to use as a general always on server. This being an ARM board rather than a PC (with a rather nice form factor – it’s basically the same size as a SSD) you’d normally expect a blog post about it to include instructions for kernels and patches and so on but with these systems and current Debian testing there’s no need – Debian works out of the box (including our standard kernel) on it, the instructions worked easily and I now have a new machine sitting quietly in the corner serving away. Sadly it being a dual core A7 it’s not got the grunt to replace my kernel build test system, an ARM allmodconfig takes eleven and a bit hours as opposed to a little less than twenty minutes on my desktop (which does draw well over an order of magnitude more power doing it), but otherwise you’d never notice the difference when using the system.

The upshot of all this is that actually there’s no real adventure at all; for systems like these where the system vendors and the communities around them are doing the right things and working well with upstream things just work as you’d expect with minimal effort.

The one thing that’s noticeably different from installing on a PC and really could do with improving is that instead of being shipped as part of the board the boot firmware has to be written to a SD card, something that could be addressed as easily as simply shipping a suitably programmed SD card in the box even without any other modification of the hardware, though on board flash would be even nicer.