[conspire] Home Servers

[Nick Moffitt]

On 20Mar2024 10:45am (-0700), Rick Moen wrote:
> Don Marti says separately mentions an intriguing Framework Laptop
> conversion kit revolves around a motherboard with a AMD Ryzen
> 7040-series CPU/GPU chip, which I was prepared to dismiss as
> stupendously overblown for a home server.  As it turns out, the TDP* is
> 35-54W, which is... not actually horrible.  _But_, still needs active
> cooling.  

I have a framework 13 with the previous generation of Intel motherboard.  If I upgrade to the lower-power AMD board, I'll need to get new RAM, so the board in this thing will probably become a closet server of some variety.

But the need for fans is even higher on this thing.  I have it throttled to an inch of its life, and it still gets warmer than I want.  That's why I covet the Ryzen upgrade, although I'm unemployed at present and don't have the budget to justify such a purchase.

> Forgive the vagueness, please, but I keep following developments from
> the Pine64 people, who make a variety of things including ARMv8.2-A
> -based SBCs, and find them promising.  They're currently topping out at
> 8GB RAM, like this one with a PCIe x1 slot, the QuartzPro64 Model A:
> https://pine64.com/product/quartz64-model-a-8gb-single-board-computer/
> But, on balance, even they aren't filling the home-server niche, nor are
> they yet exploring 64-bit ARM CPUs' ability to drive higher RAM.  _And_
> they don't do that "needs lots of code from out of tree" bullshit that
> you-know-who does all the time.

The Pine64 folks have been somewhat vague on their own, in general.  They're explicitly a community project to produce white-box rebrands of vetted hardware through the same channels that the low-to-mid-range vendors use.  There are a lot of video reviews out there that balk and exclaim "But this is just a [[NAME OF BRAND RELEASED TWO YEARS AGO]]!"  yeah, that's because that brand was just a semi-generic model of $THING you can get a lot of Chinese production concerns to churn out for you.  That's not necessarily a bad thing!

Anyway, FOSDEM last month saw a sort of Pine64 BoF event where everyone agreed that the community updates had been absent to the point that people assumed they'd folded!  In fact, the relevant engineers were just head-down doing Engineering, and the previous community folks had run out of time to devote to the project.  So as a result of the FOSDEM meetup, they put PR back as a priority:

	https://pine64.org/2024/03/17/march-update-making-waves/