[conspire] Another low-power server

[Don Marti]

begin Luke S Crawford quotation of Wed, Oct 07, 2009 at 09:16:37PM -0400:

> > I'm certainly interested in these ARM--based options, especially the
> > ones able to support a reasonable amount of RAM, and able to mount a
> > mirrored pair of hi-speed or "SuperSpeed" USB drives, so you're not 
> > limited to Flash.  However, doing without floating point (thus, painful
> > SSL/ssh) seems a high price to pay.  
> 
> Hm.  I thought the new ARMs had a FPU.  the OMAP stuff?  It's not
> really my area, I just hear chatter about it because it is Sarah's.

"Sheeva" seems to be one of those marketing
names. Just looked at the datasheets on the Marvell
sites.

The 88F6281, which is what you get on the SheevaPlug
and the Open-RD, does not seem to have have floating
point, although it does have hardware support for
SHA1 and AES.

The MV78x00 Sheeva processors do have floating point.

> I have a opengear brand 48 port serial console server that I access
> via ssh, and it is rather slow, but not unusable.   the slowness is
> only a problem when you connect (or, I imagine, if you were trying
> to copy files over ssh)  - once you are connected, it is plenty 
> responsive.  

I think that once you have your ssh connection set up,
you're using a symmetric cipher such as AES, which
is designed to run fast, no floating point needed.
Even ~200MHz ARM machines are fast enough once the
connection is established.

-- 
Don Marti                                 +1 510-332-1587 mobile
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti at zgp.org