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Racklet Community Meeting Notes 2024

This document contains the notes of the Racklet community meeting. The meeting occurs every other Tuesday at 6 PM CET/CEST (on even weeks). Check the #racklet channel on the OSFW Slack for more info.

This document is best viewed and edited online: hackmd-github-sync-badge

NOTE: The meeting time has been changed from UTC to follow CET/CEST, use the link above to check the time in your local time zone!

[TOC]

December 10th, 2024 6:00 PM CET/CEST

:::info

Biweekly Recap

Daniel

Dennis

  • Quite busy with final exams, all done now
  • Getting into PCB design with KiCad
  • Attempting CPU-GPU shared memory on the Raspberry Pi 5
    • This seems to need a special VCSM driver
    • On the Pi 5 the GPU firmware is no longer in charge of memory, just power and clocks
  • Acquiring an ESP32-C6 RISC-V MCU board for some experimentation with esp-rs

November 26th, 2024 6:00 PM CET/CEST

:::info

Biweekly Recap

Daniel

Dennis

  • Submitted a talk for the KubeCon EU 2025 CFP!
  • Looking into the DNG (Digital Negative) and JPEG-XL ecosystem
    • Including Rust encoding/decoding support: jxl-rs
  • Through the signing service Daniel brought up discovered the NetHSM
    • Basically a Xeon-based (with disabled ME) networked programmable "Yubikey server"
    • The docs don't mention Coreboot support...
    • Might be useful as a concept for Racklet as well, downscaled of course

November 12th, 2024 6:00 PM CET/CEST

:::info

Biweekly Recap

Dennis

  • Looking into Gokrazy

Daniel

October 29th, 2024 6:00 PM CET/CEST

:::info No meeting :::

October 15th, 2024 4:00 PM UTC

:::info

Biweekly Recap

Dennis

  • Quite busy with my thesis work
  • Looked into TamaGo again
    • This (and the USB armory) are apparently under WithSecure
  • Looked into how they do DRAM init in bare metal Go for the USB armory with Daniel
    • Apparently, i.MX6(ULL) SoCs have their DRAM init in hardware, one only needs to provide DRAM parameters (and some other options) via a config through u-boot's mkimage and the mask ROM handles the rest

Daniel

  • Started extending Romulan yet again
    • Including a diff feature, starting with AMD
    • Looking at many projects to gather information on processors, including coreboot
  • DRAM init still almost done for TH1520, needs debugging now

October 1st, 2024 4:00 PM UTC

:::info

Biweekly Recap

Dennis

  • Not much direct progress on Racklet
  • Investigated driver support for a microcontroller on an X570 motherboard

Daniel

September 17th, 2024 4:00 PM UTC

:::info

Biweekly Recap

Dennis

  • On-and-off work on the x86 test cluster software, not much time for other Racklet work
  • Looking a bit more into pub/sub platforms, particularly for metrics, but nothing to report yet

Daniel

  • Got back to fiedka.app, upgraded its dependencies
    • Draft for ME partition and file system parsing

Live session

We got code to run on a Rockchip RK3566 (OKdo ROCK 3) in mask ROM mode. https://forum.radxa.com/t/solved-is-there-a-way-to-load-a-program-directly-into-sram-using-usb-otg/5475/9

Using xrock and rkbin:

_DIR=../rkbin/bin/rk35
_DRAM=$_DIR/rk3566_ddr_528MHz_ultra_v1.10.bin
_USB=$_DIR/rk356x_usbplug_v1.17.bin

xrock maskrom $_DRAM $_USB --rc4-off
sleep 2
xrock version
# RK3568(3568): 0x33353638 0xffffffff 0xffffffff 0xffffffff

September 3rd, 2024 4:00 PM UTC

:::info No meeting :::

August 20, 2024 4:00 PM UTC

:::info

Biweekly Recap

Dennis

Daniel

  • Finished reversing and translating the K1x DRAM training code
    • Tested on BPI-F3 4GB - works
    • Tested on MuseBook 16GB - works :)
  • Got back to dtvis
    • Got permission to use the DeviceTree logo from Linaro
  • Forked a Rust library for Fastboot

Discussion Topics

  • Raspberry Pi Pico 2 with RP2350 released
    • 2x Cortex-M33 + 2x Hazard3 (RISC-V)
    • Beefier and (officially) faster PIO
      • Still no clock input: no advantage in synchronizing with SD host signaling compared to RP2040, however, upon reading the datasheet I discovered that one can disable the input synchronizers to gain 2 cycles of latency (also available on RP2040) -> needs further testing
    • probe-rs needs some work
    • DEF CON 2024 badge is based on RP2350
  • WHY2025 badge will have an ESP32-P4 (main SoC) + ESP32-C3 (for radios) + WCH CH32Vxxx (keyboard)
  • Akeana as a new RISC-V vendor
  • C910 vector extension broken -> GhostWrite

August 6, 2024 3:00 PM UTC

:::info

Biweekly Recap

Dennis

  • Acquired (one of) the world's last Rock Pi 5B's with more than 8 GiB of RAM (why are these so rare? The blue PCB version seems to be available a bit more frequently...)
    • Will try some u-root/DT experiments on the platform
  • x86 software develompent cluster developed SATA communication issues: now waiting for new cables to arrive...
  • Framework RISC-V mainboard (JH7110)
  • Snapdragon X (Elite) UEFI and ACPI + DT?
  • The Signaloid C0-microSD module finally saw its first code drop after 4 months: https://github.com/signaloid/C0-microSD-Hardware

Daniel

June 11, 2024 3:00 PM UTC

:::info No meeting until August :::

May 28, 2024 3:00 PM UTC

:::info

Biweekly Recap

Dennis

  • Busy with thesis work, not much time to work on Racklet currently

Daniel

  • Full-stack demo of oreboot + sbitest on Milk-V Mars (SG2002)
  • Got Linux 6.9.2 up and running with oreboot on the JH7110 + hacks
    • Need native platform timer patches (pending for upstream)
    • Defer probing ethernet, temperature sensor and QSPI to the end
    • cpu works, but not kexec

May 14, 2024 3:00 PM UTC

:::info

Biweekly Recap

Dennis

  • Major work on my x86 cluster serving as the Racklet software testbed
    • Upgraded from USB3 HDD docks to real M.2 PCIe SATA controllers
      • 4Kn mode for HDDs
      • Performance impact surprisingly small, the USB HDD docks do a pretty good job -> advantageous for Racklet
    • JuiceFS metadata performance is rather slow, tested various databases:
      • KeyDB -> very fast initially, large amount of operations slow it to a crawl. Lots of segfaults, a bunch of tweaking needed to get running somewhat reliably.
      • FoundationDB -> very consistent and "lag-free" performance, but rather long latencies causing low performance
      • TiKV -> middle ground, not nearly as fast as KeyDB but also maintains consistent performance like FoundationDB, wins longer benchmarks like creating 100000 files etc. Rather CPU-heavy though
    • Storage system is consuming basically all of the CPU capacity -> FUSE overhead is enormous, and starving the backing MinIO and TiKV instances of CPU time leading to pretty abysmal performance, even with SSD caching enabled
    • Testing Ceph BlueStore next...

Daniel (couldn't really join, sorry)

  • Sophgo/CVITek SoCs
    • Got a few more SG2002 boards (Sipeed LicheeRV Nano)
    • Added boot mode buttons to the IO boards for Duo + Duo 256M
    • Reversed a good bunch of the CV1800B and SG200x mask ROMs
      • Mostly SG200x, including the Arm one
    • Really neat target, allowing for loading binaries over USB (serial gadget) anytime
      • That is a mask ROM function to just call into

April 30, 2024 3:00 PM UTC

:::info

Biweekly Recap

Daniel

  • Got a Milk-V Duo S (SG2000) and a Duo 256M (SG2002)
    • Figured out how to run code on each
    • Wrote a simple Rust tool to do so
      • The vendor tool is tightly coupled with their build tool
      • Helps others :)
    • Got basic hello on all 3, including the earlier Duo (CV1800B)
    • Ported most of DRAM init for the Duo S (DDR3, 512M @ 1866)
      • Working fine, some parts of BIST (built-in self-test) remain
      • Reference code is very long (> 10k LoC), but well documented

April 16, 2024 3:00 PM UTC

:::info No meeting :::

April 2, 2024 3:00 PM UTC

:::info

  • Location: https://jitsi.hamburg.ccc.de/racklet-community
  • Date: April 2, 2024 3:00 PM UTC (note the updated time!)
  • Host: @twelho
  • Participants:
    • Dennis Marttinen, @twelho
    • Daniel Maslowski, @orangecms
    • Verneri Hirvonen, @chiplet
    • Ron Minnich, @rminnich :::

Biweekly Recap

Dennis

  • Visited KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2024
    • Multiple Racklet-style x86/ARM portable mini-clusters were on show
      • Mostly older or more specialized implementations
      • Intel Atom/Celeron & RK3588
      • No major RISC-V adoption in the cloud native space yet
    • Talos Linux (also Racklet's base OS) is picking up steam
  • For Racklet's backplane/HAT MCU platforms, researched aWsm and ARM's bento boxes as an interesting way to bundle/deploy memory-isolated MCU applications
  • More work on getting JuiceFS running on my x86 development cluster
  • Finally acquired some ChipQuik flux!

Verneri

Daniel

  • Working on oreboot design things
    • Zephyr + Linux codesign (or any combo of OSes?)
    • We can run Zephyr on the JH7110 S7 core with oreboot
    • Experimenting with DTFS (Device Tree File System) ideas

March 19, 2024 4:00 PM UTC

:::info No meeting :::

March 5, 2024 4:00 PM UTC

:::info

Biweekly Recap

Dennis

  • Back again after some traveling
  • Master's thesis work started, will see how much extra time I still have
  • Working further on developing the Racklet storage solution prototype on my x86 testing cluster
    • One of my 2 TB development disks broke: bought 6 * 16 TB disks at a very good price (but still expensive in total...)
    • At least now I have extra 2 TB disks for testing fitment into the Racklet mini-rack
  • Managed to completely brick an old WD MyBook Live Duo NAS
    • Needed to re-flash U-Boot, but turns out erasing the NOR flash where U-Boot is installed from the prompt and then running a command that references said flash is not a good idea 😅
  • KiCad 8.0 released: https://www.kicad.org/blog/2024/02/Version-8.0.0-Released/
  • Joining KubeCon EU 2024, so won't be able to host the next meeting

February 20, 2024 4:00 PM UTC

:::info

Biweekly Recap

Daniel

  • Just discovered terminal graphics, and especially vector graphics protocols
    • Made a ReGIS demo for MountainBytes
    • Currently summarizing everything from the 60ies on
    • Deriving new specs from it for a seemless web native environment
      • WebALE: Web Application Launch Environment
      • WebGAP: Web General Application Protocol
    • Might be interesting for Racklet as well
    • Think of Plan 9 drawterm and cpu, but with applications in mind
    • Main idea: self-serving binaries, somewhat like syslets and the other syslets
      • you drag them over to e.g. a Racklet SBC
      • out comes an app plus additional data over time
      • this is much like web apps are deployed today
      • maybe I'll call them netlets or sidelets or... ideas?

February 6, 2024 4:00 PM UTC

:::info

Biweekly Recap

Daniel

  • Minor success with Zephyr on the JH7110, getting spurious interrupts
    • Source apparently the video out subsystem, though it should be off
  • Continued reversing the JH7110 mask ROM and the header
    • Erratum found in the manual: DTIM really starts at 0x0110_0000
    • Figured some fields so far where key material is put in the header
  • We did few steps on the TH1520 at FOSDEM, mostly just discussed oreboot design/architecture

January 23, 2024 4:00 PM UTC

:::info

Biweekly Recap

Daniel

January 9, 2024 4:00 PM UTC

:::info

Biweekly Recap

Dennis

  • Back in Finland, setting up development workflow again
  • Need to do a bit of maintenance on the Racklet repos
  • Building a concept of the software (Kubernetes) stack for Racklet
    • Targeting my home cluster (5 x86_64 machines) for now, but should be cross-architecture
    • Working on defining a clear infrastructure/workload separation API
    • Test driving distributed storage based on JuiceFS + MinIO + TiKV
    • Flux OCI source as single source of truth
  • Applied some fixes and improvements to my 3D printer

Verneri

  • Did not have a lot of time to work on projects over the festive season. Courses are ramping up for the beginning of 2024 so I don't have a lot of free time for the next six weeks either.
  • Got my 3D printer assembled and calibrated in preparation to experiment with custom 19" rack mounting brackets.
  • Experimented with using Shelly Plus Plug S for monitoring 19" rack power consumption.

Daniel