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 in the OSFW Slack for more info.
This document is best viewed and edited online:
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:::info
- Location: https://jitsi.hamburg.ccc.de/racklet-community
- Date: February 4th, 2025 6:00 PM CET/CEST
- Host: @twelho
- Participants: :::
:::info
- Location: https://jitsi.hamburg.ccc.de/racklet-community
- Date: January 21st, 2025 6:00 PM CET/CEST
- Host: @twelho
- Participants:
- Dennis Marttinen, @twelho
- Daniel Maslowski, @orangecms :::
- Daniel hinted at the newly established mini rack project from Jeff Geerling
- Uses the same 10" rack form factor as Racklet
- 3D-printed plates to mount Pi's etc.
- Other useful shelves/mounts listed there as well
- Power delivery is a challenge – as we've already discovered with Racklet
- Network switch lists are useful for Racklet
- Looking forward to the community discovering powerful-enough PoE switches for multiple nodes
- Software/firmware side severely lacking though:
- No firmware security/boot integrity/Open Compute -level secure boot
- Very basic (mutable) Kubernetes setups only
- TL;DR: Useful for sourcing parts for the Racklet hardware side, though we want more density and better firmware security + actual Open Compute -level software (immutable Kubernetes)
- Achieved over 14k 4K direct random read QD2 IOPS with Ceph on the x86 test cluster! 📈
- In layman's terms: distributed filesystems can be made very snappy at a small scale as well
- This proves the viability of Ceph on lower-end hardware, SBCs such as the Rock 5B should not have any issues running this stack
- 8 GiB of RAM, 4 threads and Gigabit ethernet is sufficient
- Made lots of progress on the BL808
- Got the loader tool to the point where it can load any binary for any core to run immediately
- Got PSRAM working
- Did another dev live stream on it
:::info
- Location: https://jitsi.hamburg.ccc.de/racklet-community
- Date: January 7th, 2025 6:00 PM CET/CEST
- Host: @twelho
- Participants:
- Dennis Marttinen, @twelho
- Daniel Maslowski, @orangecms :::
- More thorough test of the TH1520 showed its DRAM wasn't really working
- Got back on the Bouffalo Lab BL808
- Started a loader tool as usual
- Slowly figuring out how the boot process and the many efuse bits work
- Lots of open resources from the community and the vendor
- Started a loader tool as usual
- 38C3 was a blast 🎉 - blog post on OSFF website coming soon™️
- We bootstrapped the Canaan K230 SoC during a workshop
- Reversed its mask ROM in a previous one (got started)
- More work on the x86 Racklet software architecture test cluster
- Ceph (distributed storage) is now running very well
- Encountered some bugs in Cilium (networking)
- Talos Linux has an annoying bug that prevents upgrades right now
- Taught myself KiCad over the holidays, received first PCB from JLC
- Haven't yet gotten into messing with the RISC-V ESP32C6
- Explored Linux real-time scheduling on a Raspberry Pi 3
threadirqsis very useful for multicore embedded systems