perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Phil Reese <>]

Hi Brian,

We bought 2 2g RPI4s and 2 4g RPI4s, all work pretty smoothly.   They do get much warmer than RPI3s!   I've had them all in a mesh already and they kept up their 1g side of the connection as well as any of the other agent systems (typically Celeron systems).  I think they are going to make a big impact, just not yet...

The issue with them is that there isn't a stable OS for use with perfSONAR bundles.  The new version of Raspbian is pretty good AND enables the use of all the 1/2/4G of RAM, which is great.  BUT it is too new of a version of debian for the perfSONAR distribution to work with!

The other usual candidate OS versions for the RPI, Ubuntu in particular, have plans to support the RPI4 when they have the time.  Some Google searching surfaces this site, https://jamesachambers.com/raspberry-pi-ubuntu-server-18-04-2-installation-guide/  It has been updated 3-4 times just since the RPI4 has been released.

The bottom line for all the non-Raspbian OSs is you are limited to only 1g of RAM use for the moment!  And according to the cited webs site, the 32bit version of Ubuntu 18.04.02 is more stable.  (I've used both the 32 and 64 bit versions and both seemed fine for perfSONAR stuff and the PS bundles loaded fine.)  The briefly mentioned CloudKernel version worked pretty well and was the easiest 64bit version that I've found, however they haven't updated it since the first release.  The Raspbian developers have been very active and have updated a lot their boot code (which all the other OS makers pick up and reuse) over time, so the CloudKernel version is pretty 'old' at only 5 weeks old!

Oh, yes, one last knock on the non-Raspbian OSs, so far none support IPv6, (at least not without a fair amount of work) which might not be a blocker at the moment but should be a limitation soon!

I think that when a solid distribution is ready for the RPI4, it will be a 'contender', its time just isn't right yet, IMHO.

Phil

On 8/19/19 6:46 AM, Brian Candler wrote:

I notice that the Raspberry Pi 4 was released a couple of months ago, and in particular it comes with "full speed" gig ethernet (not a USB2-ethernet) and with 1/2/4GB of RAM.

I wonder if anyone had any experience with this as a perfsonar testpoint?  It sounds like it could do a good job at a very low price point.

Thanks,

Brian.

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