Exploring a production Cavium ThunderX platform with a Gigabyte R120-T30 1U server

[Patrick Kennedy]

We take a look at the Gigabyte R120-T30 1U server, the first production Cavium ThunderX system we have in the data center lab

The post Exploring a production Cavium ThunderX platform with a Gigabyte R120-T30 1U server appeared first on ServeTheHome - Server and Workstation Reviews.

Related posts:

1. Cavium and Gigabyte Launching 384 Core ARMv8 2U server cluster
2. Cavium ThunderX – 48 Core ARM Design Announced
3. Exclusive: First Cavium ThunderX Dual 48 Core (96 core total) ARM Benchmarks
4. Gigabyte releases ARM server based on AppliedMicro X-Gene

Continue reading...

 

[T_Minus]

Since that 256GB DDR4 is too much for testing it out feel free to send it my way

It will be interesting to see some performance comparisons.

 

[Patrick]

Since that 256GB DDR4 is too much for testing it out feel free to send it my way

It will be interesting to see some performance comparisons.

Heh, we put all of this stuff to use.

 

[rnavarro]

This is a sweeeet board!

The 16x onboard SATA ports and oodles of networking definitely caught my attention.

I've never played with any ARM gear, how do other applications handle this platform? You mentioned you were running Ubuntu 16.04, do the standard apt-get install commands work for most of the usual software? Is all of the cross compiling taken care of in the repos?

Sorry for all the questions, very curious

 

[Patrick]

This is a sweeeet board!

The 16x onboard SATA ports and oodles of networking definitely caught my attention.

I've never played with any ARM gear, how do other applications handle this platform? You mentioned you were running Ubuntu 16.04, do the standard apt-get install commands work for most of the usual software? Is all of the cross compiling taken care of in the repos?

Sorry for all the questions, very curious

Subject of a future piece. 14.04 was pretty rough. 16.04 much better. There are still things like 7zip that have parts (e.g. LZMA) that are assembly coded for x86. The optimizations are mostly done on the x86 side with room to go on ARM.

 

[Hank C]

there is typo in the article

We had 4x 32GB DDR4 2133MHz RDIMMs installed but we did also add a set of 8x 256GB DDR4 RDIMMs just to validate all eight DIMM slots could be populated.

seen anything wrong?

 

[nemykal]

Hey Patrick, did you have any issues getting the R120-T30 to boot? I've got one that refuses to go past this message no matter which Linux I've tried (Ubuntu 16, Fedora 24). Same thing from booting UEFI off usb or with the IPMI virtual iso drive

"Exiting boot services and installing virtual address map..."

Basically this error, though I havent had any success with increasing debug verbosity - RHELSA DP 7.1: aarch64 kernel seems to hang when booting with mem=16G, debugging shows kernel panic at unpack_to_rootfs - Red Hat Customer Portal

Any ideas?

 

[Patrick]

Hey Patrick, did you have any issues getting the R120-T30 to boot? I've got one that refuses to go past this message no matter which Linux I've tried (Ubuntu 16, Fedora 24). Same thing from booting UEFI off usb or with the IPMI virtual iso drive

"Exiting boot services and installing virtual address map..."

Basically this error, though I havent had any success with increasing debug verbosity - RHELSA DP 7.1: aarch64 kernel seems to hang when booting with mem=16G, debugging shows kernel panic at unpack_to_rootfs - Red Hat Customer Portal

Any ideas?

What version of firmware are you using? I needed to upgrade firmware to go from 14.04 to 16.04 but have done testing on the Ubuntu side not RHEL.

 

[nemykal]

Mine came with the latest bios version currently available, D26: GIGABYTE - Server Barebone - ARM SoC - R120-T30 (rev. 100)

I'm going to do some more troubleshooting tomorrow. Did you initially install 14.04 from an iso/usb or was that just how Gigabyte supplied it - I had trouble even tracking down an arm64 14.04 image

 

[nemykal]

I contacted Gigabyte and received a pre-release BIOS to use, which fixed the issue. Looks like there is a problem with the D26 bios and some memory configurations.

 

[Patrick]

I contacted Gigabyte and received a pre-release BIOS to use, which fixed the issue. Looks like there is a problem with the D26 bios and some memory configurations.

Sorry I missed your reply. Good to hear the BIOS fixed it. There is still some of that on these platforms.

On the 14.04 it was pre-loaded by Cavium. My advice: start from 16.04 not from 14.04. Not only is 16.04 newer and likely going to be supported longer but a lot of package repos now work in 16.04.