Looking for new ARM server

[calzon65]

My first ALARM server was a PogoPlug V2 I purchased a few years ago, and then I purchased a BeagleBone Black (both the original version and the updated version). Thanks to the hard work of the ALARM volunteer developers, all those ARM systems are working great for me and I could not be happier.

I’m now thinking about adding a new ARM system to my inventory and am considering the ODROID-U3 (I’m looking for a bit more power but want to keep the total cost of the board, case, storage, power supply, etc., under $100). I like that it has 2GB RAM and that I can choose from a few different eMMC modules. I wonder what others think about the ODROID-U3. I know the unit comes with a quad core processor, but I also wondered if ALARM can “make use” of a quad core processor. I put “make use” in quotes because I realize that question can have different meanings to different people. I also understand that the “make use” question can flow down to the design of an individual application and the compiler used.

Anyway, I would love to hear with others think.

[WarheadsSE]

Yeah, we handle multi-processor and multi-threading just fine. We've disabled no OOBE features in any software we compile in regards to such handling.

[calzon65]

WarheadSE I sincerely appreciate your quick and thoughtful response. Sorry I'm a bit out of my league in this arena but I have been reading up on the concepts of an operating system automatically allocating process across different cores (e.g., load balancing) as well as individual applications being specifically written as multi-threaded.

So to make sure I understand, I just had two quick questions. First, when you said we handle multi-processor and multi-threading, I assume you mean ALARM is compiled as multi-threaded and it's designed to automatically allocate (load balance) processes across different cores? Second, what about the precompiled applications in the ALARM package database, are those also compiled to take advantage of multiple cores?

Note: I do understand (a little) that designing an application to be multi-threaded is another level of programming and some applications may not be written that way and I did read in the ALARM wiki about making changes to MAKEFLAGS regarding multi-core compiling but was not sure if the default was to have packages multi-core compiled ... maybe not because it might cause problems on single-core systems but as I said above, this is a bit out of my league as I come up to speed.

[Socaltom]

One of my plugs is a PogoV3 with the dual core oxnas CPU. I can tell you that the system itself uses both cores. I can tell that my watching "top", if will report 200% cpu use when I run multiple programs. It appears to try and load balance the different programs accross the cores. Within the programs themselves, it depends on how they are written as to whether they will make use of both cores. The bzip program has a benchmark built in, which allows you select whether to test with one core or two. ffmpeg recently got updated to support multi-threading for some of the encoding, but not necessarily all encoding.
Tom