Armbian Donations

[Bozza]

Call to Action: Armbian donation round.

 

Dear members of the community, 

 

Do you love the armbian OS? 

Are you frustrated by bugs or problems within armbian? 

Do you wish that armbian was even better with more releases? 

 

If the answer is yes keep reading because there may be a solution. 

 

As you know the dedicated team of developers here code this project in their spare time to develop an incredible Linux OS for our ARM devices. They do this for the love of this hobby and we all benefit from it because it is an open source project.

 

One of the hurdles is the fast compiling of the armbian OS. To solve this issue the developers are looking to purchase or rent an 80 core ARM build server. This will improve compilation times and therefore the workflow of the developers. It will mean that they can develop at a much faster pace and more importantly diagnose problems, optimize code and iron out bugs a lot more effectively and efficiently.

 

The developers are currently considering the Ampere Altra. 

 

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15949/ampere-altra-1p-server-pictured-gigabytes-2u-with-80-arm-n1-cores-pcie-40-and-ccix

 

To make this a reality I, on behalf of the development team, am asking for everybody to chip in. If everybody donates just a little bit the developers will be able to get this server and develop the armbian software that we all love so much.

 

What are you waiting for? 

 

Hit subscribe in the menu of the forum. Every major payment method is accepted.

[Igor]

On 10/26/2020 at 12:08 PM, Bozza said:

Are you frustrated by bugs or problems

At least people that work on development can mitigate this frustration when catching the bug or fixing the problem.

 

On 10/26/2020 at 12:08 PM, Bozza said:

To solve this issue the developers are looking to purchase or rent an 80 core ARM build server.

 

We just got ARM64 server on our hand as a donation from:
 

https://www.worksonarm.com/
https://github.com/WorksOnArm/cluster

 

but it will only be available for limited time and before we can use it in production, we need to port our build system to support native building, test and then start using it in production. 

 

On 10/26/2020 at 12:08 PM, Bozza said:

It will mean that they can develop at a much faster pace and more importantly diagnose problems, optimize code and iron out bugs a lot more effectively and efficiently.

 

Fastest build server we will need to purchase - we still need a major CPU upgrade on cross compilation server. Something in range of Threadripper 3970x / 3990x + board + pci4 ssd in raid0 + 128GB memory which will costs us ∼6000 EUR.

 

Our current aging 5 years old Dual Xeon E5-2683 build/CI server was also purchased with help from community and I hope we will also receive help!

[NicoD]

Link to donate for the server 

May we know more about the ARM64 server? What cores? How many? What frequency? What cooling? Just any info  

[Werner]

Woohoo. Joined the fundraiser club

[xwiggen]

6 hours ago, Igor said:

Fastest build server we will need to purchase - we still need a major CPU upgrade on cross compilation server. Something in range of Threadripper 3970x / 3990x + board + pci4 ssd in raid0 + 128GB memory which will costs us ∼6000 EUR.

might consider Epyc with 8 channels, 16 dimm slots and better I/O, memory is "cheap"/upgradeable upto 1TB. 

 

Best of luck!

[Igor]

6 minutes ago, xwiggen said:

might consider Epyc with 8 channels, 16 dimm slots and better I/O, memory is "cheap"/upgradeable upto 1TB. 

Epyc 7702 was initial idea, but considering this will serve as a build / CI on a bare metal, 128GB is actually enough. Additonal 128Gb will be helpful when building images in parallel. Even with 1TB we would not be able to build them all in parallel  

 

23 minutes ago, xwiggen said:

Best of luck!

Thanks! Always needed when building from scratch

[ning]

Paypal is not usable popular in China, would you like to add Alipay or wechat Pay, if you want to accept RMB donation.

BTW, I think some of you have experience in buy products in Aliexpress, thus you may have an Alipay accounts.

 

 

Alipay: https://intl.alipay.com/?locale=en_US

Wechat Pay: https://pay.weixin.qq.com/index.php/public/wechatpay

[Igor]

4 hours ago, ning said:

Paypal is not usable popular in China, would you like to add Alipay or wechat Pay, if you want to accept RMB donation.

BTW, I think some of you have experience in buy products in Aliexpress, thus you may have an Alipay accounts.

 

For forum e-commerce system we can only use one of those:
 

 

Possible universal alternative is donating Bitcoins, but we can't relate back to who made a donation. https://www.armbian.com/donate/

[jeanrhum]

I gave some bucks for this powerful server. Paypal was perfect for me. Long live to armbian!

I hope the target will be attained soon.

[Igor]

Additional question / research on memory modules - what would be best for our use case and this hardware.

Those
Kingston Server Premier - DDR4 - 32 GB - DIMM 288-PIN - 3200 MHz / PC4-25600 - CL22 - 1.2 V - ungepuffert - ECC

are probably safest purchase and should just work?

Or something like this?  

G.Skill Trident Z Royal Series - DDR4 - 32 GB - DIMM 288-PIN - 4000 MHz / PC4-32000 - CL18 - 1.4 V - ungepuffert - non-ECC - Gold

+ pushed all the way up to 4666? Modules costs twice as much and are not ECC.

[NicoD]

On 11/6/2020 at 7:38 PM, Igor said:

Those
Kingston Server Premier - DDR4 - 32 GB - DIMM 288-PIN - 3200 MHz / PC4-25600 - CL22 - 1.2 V - ungepuffert - ECC

are probably safest purchase and should just work?

Error correction for a server seems more important than the speed of it. Are you even sure the CPU can handle such high frequencies?
I remember Wendell from Level1 making a video about it. Might be a good source for info. He's got a lot of videos about Threadripper and ram choise.
I'll watch it for you to be sure  

 

[NicoD]

More/better info. With the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990x and G.Skill 3600Mhz. Already a high memory overclock for this chip. So 4000Mhz????
I'm still checking...

[NicoD]

He said it all. 3600Mhz not stable on the ASRock Rack TRX40D8-2N2T.
"Dualer Kanal, Vier-Kanal" https://www.jacob.de/produkte/g-skill-trident-z-f4-4000c18q-128gtrg-artnr-6795425.html

Maximum supported 8 x dual rank is 2667Mhz. 
Some motherboards can do higher as overclock. But the ASRock Rack TRX40D8-2N2T can't be stable at 3600Mhz. 
So a more expensive motherboard would be needed to obtain a bit higher clock speeds.
Or you go for only 4 x 32GB to have more headroom. Or go for the 3600Mhz and run it a bit lower for stabillity.
For the goals Armbian needs it this doesn't seem worth the extra cost(IMHO).

Also must be handpicked to match for 8x.
2 x 4 buying would probably not match.

[Igor]

24 minutes ago, NicoD said:

Maximum supported 8 x dual rank is 2667Mhz. 

 

If I understand this summary properly,  first RAM variant is fast enough / a bit too much but that's not a problem since we can choose clock manually. Price is also OK and it seems they are compatible.

Thank you for doing this research.

[NicoD]

You'll still be able to do a slight overclock with the 3200Mhz too. 

[NicoD]

17 minutes ago, Igor said:

first RAM variant is fast enough / a bit too much but that's not a problem since we can choose clock manually.

Indeed
 

 

17 minutes ago, Igor said:

Price is also OK and it seems they are compatible.

Also correct.
Some more info here: https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/threadripper-3960x-3970x-3990x-and-ecc-ram-what-performance-hit-to-expect-vs-non-ecc-ram-which-is-available-at-higher-speeds.2578034/
They are stating the performance hit might be negligible for our goals. For gaming and trading faster ram seems preferable. We ain't doing that I guess  

 

 

17 minutes ago, Igor said:

Thank you for doing this research.

That's what I do. So glad to have helped, I learned something too.

[NicoD]

Or dual Epyc? https://www.amazon.com/Supermicro-Motherboard-MBD-H11DSI-NT-B-7000-Brown/dp/B07762BSTR/&tag=girgammal-20
https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B07YBYVR14/ref=dp_olp_unknown_mbc

if money was no object. I think it would be about $30 000 for the system. All images could be build at once. 

[Werner]

7 hours ago, NicoD said:

if money was no object.

Unfortunately it is

 

[Bozza]

There is something important I should add. I am sure big corporations can easily contribute money to meet the demand goal, however this is a community project and it is therefore imperative that we as individuals contribute to the project. 

 

If only big corporations contribute they will probably want to have a say in what direction the project develops which could lead to only a small fraction of devices being developed for or it could lead to a situation where they ask that only their devices are prioritised.

 

If you want that a wider range of devices are going to be worked on it is important that we also contribute, even if we just donate small amounts. At the end of the day there are a lot of us who have an interest in running armbian on our devices.

 

Essentially we have to be fast and donate faster than the companies who only have a commercial interest! 

 

If you are not able to donate there are also other ways to contribute towards the project. Writing documentation, translating documentation, programming and even fan artwork is important (desktop background images, forum banners, forum signatures and other artwork). 

 

Do you love armbian as much as I do? 

 

Don't wait and contribute to the project now by any means you wish! 

 

 

[ning]

thanks to Armbian leads me to the Arm world, I can build my own os image for my arm SBC.

 

[Igor]

Board is here 

 

[JMCC]

Nice!

BTW, someone might have noticed my new "aggresive" signature. In case someone wants to use the same image, or modify it (change the color, etc.), it is available here: https://users.armbian.com/jmcc/images/

[lanefu]

7 hours ago, Igor said:

Board is here 

it matches your keyboard

[Werner]

Woohoo \o/ More than half way done. Everyone who donated: YOU ARE AWESOME!

[Heisath]

Interesting thing: One more donator than donations:

[Werner]

May a donation via bank wire which needs to be approved manually.

[NicoD]

35 minutes ago, Werner said:

May a donation via bank wire which needs to be approved manually.

I think it's the very first. Check the date.

[Igor]

I couldn't remove my 1st test donation without starting a campaign from scratch ... and - its a software where bugs are possible  Nevertheless it does the job.

 

We also added additional 2 x 64GB DOM to have system on a separate partition in RAID1.

 

Items are slowly arriving.

[Igor]

2 x NVME arrived, memory tomorrow, CPU, cooling and 2x DOM ETA next week.

[NicoD]

On 11/10/2020 at 10:02 AM, Heisath said:

Interesting thing: One more donator than donations:

 

On 11/10/2020 at 10:05 AM, Werner said:

May a donation via bank wire which needs to be approved manually.

I fixed it