[Not recommended] Latte Panda (redux)

[Tsaukpaetra]

Since there are now more versions of Latte Panda, I'm starting a new thread from the tails of This thread.

I have received my Latte Panda Delta and for funzies smushed FreeNAS 11.2rc2 on a thumb drive and booted it just fine. I had to add a loader.conf entry to stop it hanging while looking for an SD card in the micro SD slot:

Code:

hint.sdhci_pci.1.disabled=1

(add in tunables as a loader config)

Observations:

• At the 8GB minimum, you are quite limited in what you can do. Don't expect magic here! (duh)
• You're limited to USB 3.0-connected drives or if you have a M.2 adapter to expose the PCI-e part of the M.2 slot you could in theory plug in a RAID card to add drives. But (If memory serves) this is only a x4 slot equivalent, so again, don't expect miracles.
• The CPU is reported as 1.0 GHz instead of 2.6 GHz, I'm assuming that's the base clock? It certainly feels like it ramps up to the full speed.
• VMs (bhyve) do work! But again, you're not going to get any miracles. Do NOT attempt to exceed perhaps 6 GB of RAM (not even with overprovision) Bad things happen very quickly.
• If you do decide to actually use this legitimately, I would recommend using ARC2. That's probably the only way you'll get anything close to bearable with this.

Overall, it's definitely possible, but why waste your money?

 

[kdragon75]

I would recommend using ARC2

Do you mean L2ARC? As long as everything is using large (128k) blocks/records and you keep the size reasonable (less than 64GB) with a fast NVMe drive and lots of tuning, I could see that being "workable". Haha that means a USB zpool... Never mind!
I have been tempted to get one of these to run ESXi but couldn't justify the price/performance, even at 12 watts or whatever it is.

 

[Tsaukpaetra]

Do you mean L2ARC? As long as everything is using large (128k) blocks/records and you keep the size reasonable (less than 64GB) with a fast NVMe drive and lots of tuning, I could see that being "workable". Haha that means a USB zpool... Never mind!

Yes L2ARC, it's been a while since I used the proper term.

Yeah, so far the USB pool has only failed to mount twice!

I have been tempted to get one of these to run ESXi but couldn't justify the price/performance, even at 12 watts or whatever it is.

For now I'm using it as a stop-gap for a smoother transition to FreeNAS 11 (migration is stalled because there's no easy way to convert VirtualBox VMs to bhyve.)

 

[kdragon75]

migration is stalled because there's no easy way to convert VirtualBox VMs to bhyve.

You should be able to convert from the V-Box disk to a raw and then dd to a zvol. You may need to do this on linux though as I dont think FreeBSD has qemu tools.

EDIT: Hmm you would still need to convert to uefi boot if the VMs are not already..