jgreco
Resident Grinch
- Joined
- May 29, 2011
- Messages
- 18,680
Well, speaking as someone who builds and deploys OS images for both i386 and amd64, I can say that the differences in supporting those two platforms aren't huge, and if someone came to me with ARM hardware that was reasonably supported by FreeBSD, I suspect I would quite likely be able to support it without a lot of effort.
The problem with the low end Raspberry Pi grade hardware is that it's made to be cheap, which means you get a single crappy ethernet controller. If I could get a hundred ARM cores with a respectable amount of memory and decent networking controllers, that could be a great jail server, without a lot of the x86 hardware drama. If they can keep the cost down, there's a lot of stuff where a larger number of lower performance cores could be a winner. And if we can find the equivalent of LSI HBA for ARM, then a FreeNAS solution starts to look attractive... even if it isn't ideal for every use case.
So. The thing is, it's coming. Within ten years. Back when ZFS started about 15 years ago, the resources required, CPU and memory, were onerous because the typical large x86 server had maybe two core/two socket and 4-8GB of RAM, and boy was that EXPENSIVE. The advent of cell phones and the decline of Windows in the data center has created a ripe environment for the explosion of non-x86 architectures, and as things keep moving towards being able to define infrastructure as code, the actual platform doesn't matter as much, as long as it runs Go or Python or PHP or Java. The higher level languages hide a lot of platform quirks, so it doesn't matter as much if you're running ${particular-flavor-of} Linux or FreeBSD or whatever. That just acts as an accelerant for alternative cheaper CPU's to eat into x86.
The problem with the low end Raspberry Pi grade hardware is that it's made to be cheap, which means you get a single crappy ethernet controller. If I could get a hundred ARM cores with a respectable amount of memory and decent networking controllers, that could be a great jail server, without a lot of the x86 hardware drama. If they can keep the cost down, there's a lot of stuff where a larger number of lower performance cores could be a winner. And if we can find the equivalent of LSI HBA for ARM, then a FreeNAS solution starts to look attractive... even if it isn't ideal for every use case.
So. The thing is, it's coming. Within ten years. Back when ZFS started about 15 years ago, the resources required, CPU and memory, were onerous because the typical large x86 server had maybe two core/two socket and 4-8GB of RAM, and boy was that EXPENSIVE. The advent of cell phones and the decline of Windows in the data center has created a ripe environment for the explosion of non-x86 architectures, and as things keep moving towards being able to define infrastructure as code, the actual platform doesn't matter as much, as long as it runs Go or Python or PHP or Java. The higher level languages hide a lot of platform quirks, so it doesn't matter as much if you're running ${particular-flavor-of} Linux or FreeBSD or whatever. That just acts as an accelerant for alternative cheaper CPU's to eat into x86.