LINUX Unplugged - 349: Arm: A New Hope

Episode Date: April 15, 2020

We build the server you never should, a tricked out Arm box, and push it to the limit with a telnet torture test. Plus what we're playing recently, community news, a handy self-hosted music pick, and more. Special Guests: Alan Pope and Brent Gervais.

So Wes, what do you think of this concept of Linux speedruns? Oh, I'm hooked. I love it. I mean, I don't know if I'm up for it without reading some manuals first, but... I like the idea. It wasn't our idea. It was a post over at rachelbythebay.com. She's blogged quite a few times, and this one caught our attention because, well, honestly, it's kind of a neat just idea on the surface. You start with a minimal system and then get yourself to the point

where you can do something meaningful like, I don't know, download a picture from Reddit or get in an IRC chat room. Like no nano, no VI. Maybe you get cat. Okay. But, you know, certainly nothing like Netcat or FTP or Ruby or Python or any of it. Can you build yourself up from a bare bones Linux? Yeah, you could do that. Or another speedrun example could be like go through a testing spree and test the latest Ubuntu release or test

the latest Fedora and see how fast you can spin them up but go through a sequence of things and if you discover a bug, report it and time yourself. I wouldn't mind doing some Arch install speedruns. I think we have, Wes. Hello, friends, and welcome to episode 349 of your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes.

Hey there, Wes. Hello. Looking great today. I'm sorry about the plexiglass between us. Social distancing, you understand. Yeah, that's all right. I've got this nice suit on on and it's comfortable in here. I'm actually impressed it hasn't affected your audio quality.

It's a special fabric. The mask is a little distracting. Wes, we have one of these episodes that it felt really appropriate. We're going to do something you should never do today. Don't do what Wes and Chris are going to do. We're going to build a server like you should not. This is not a how-to episode. We're going to expose a server like you should not this is not a how-to episode we're going to expose a server to the public internet open up a telnet port and have you pound on it to prove the scalability of a piece of hardware that we're going to be abusing in this demonstration i think

it's going to be a lot of fun but we have of course our steak and potatoes as well like community news and our virtual lug time appropriate greetings mumble room hello hello happy happy linux tuesday happy linux tuesday everybody nice to see you back in there poppy hello brent it's been a little bit for you too and we have a great lineup there is 31 of our virtual lug in there right now wow it's pretty's pretty great. We love you all. Yeah, it's really nice to see you there. We had a really fun pre-show over at jblive.tv. We do the show on Tuesdays at noon Pacific, but you can get that converted at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. So let's start out with a little community news

before we get into abusing hardware around here. There's a couple of stories that caught our attention, and so this one was partially inspired by our weekend activities. It's a couple of stories that caught our attention. And so this was partially inspired by our weekend activities. It's a little Steam update. It's been a while since we've had one of these. It has. It has. In part, it's both news and our weekend. It looks like really nice improvements for the AMD, easy for me to say, Radeon graphic driver in version 5.8 of your Linux kernel will be landing. That'll be a good one. Lots of nice fixes in there. And then also NVIDIA just pushed out a new update

that helps improve some recent game releases run on Proton, which I thought was just noteworthy because NVIDIA is specifically updating their driver to support Proton now. I think a lot of this is for Doom Eternal. And wow, I mean, there's users complaining and NVIDIA is actually being receptive? I guess. I mean, this is how it works on Windows. This is weird.

This is just awkward, I think. First class? Yeah, so that's in the NVIDIA version 4.0.82 stable, long-lived, quote-unquote, Linux driver. Michael Larble over at Pharonix has some really good coverage. But I think I just want to take a moment and check in with you guys because I know myself, Wes, and Cheese have all been playing some Proton games recently. Before we get to that, Popey mentioned some really interesting data on Ubuntu Podcast,

just some numbers that he noticed when they covered it on a recent episode about the difference in graphics card usage. So yeah, I was reading the article and digging into the usual Steam survey, and it struck me just how many machines in the Steam survey run NVIDIA GPUs. And I know it's anecdotally, we talk about how popular NVIDIAvidia is but i hear a lot in the community people saying imd is trouncing nvidia and amd is way more popular and they've got much higher sales figures but then when you look at the stats it's nothing like it there's way more like multiple more nvidia cards than there are uh amd cards and in fact there are more people with integrated intel cards than there are AMD

cards, according to the Steam stats, if I'm reading them correctly. That's how I've read them too. I just assume it's people that are super casual gaming, playing card games and simple games. And I'll raise my hand. I'm one of them. There's not many the Intel graphics will do for me, but there are some that's really interesting. And I guess it's the video card you have, right? Sort of the reign of the default there. It just struck me that I would have expected there to be some parity there. I would have expected NVIDIA and AMD to go toe to toe and have a similar spread of GPUs across the board from super high-end ones that, the real gamers have, down to the low-end entry-level ones. But it really wasn't like that.

It's just NVIDIA from top to bottom, and then a couple of AMD and a few Intel cards in there. It's really fast. It's worth a look. You really should go and dig into those Steam stats sometimes. They're quite fascinating. What would your bet be for a year down the road? Much the same. I don't see that everyone's going to suddenly throw away, like, however many, I can't remember

the numbers, but it was something like of the top 40 cards in the list, 60% or so were Nvidia. I can't see that many people throwing away their Nvidia cards and replacing them with AMD overnight. I just can't see it. It'd be a long transition if so. It's more like a next build, you think about it.

And if AMD is still really kicking butt, then that's probably the route you go. Well, and you can also pick up a 2080 right now, I think for right around five, $600. So, you know, that was a $1,400 card six, eight months ago. Yowza. Yikes.

I'll take one if you're buying, cheese. Yeah, cheese. If you want to, yeah... God dang, that is... I would need to see hard data that proves that you have any real advantage with those cards under Linux. I will couch that saying perhaps maybe under Windows in certain circumstances, for sure, but I'm just not really sure if Linux games

are fully taking advantage of it. I'd love to see the data that says they are. If you're going to invest $600, you could buy a whole computer for that and play on the graphics that it comes with and maybe not notice a huge difference. I know that's old man Chris speaking, but that frame rate, Chris, the frame rate. So I've been playing over the weekend, Batman Arkham City on Proton, and it's pretty good. I really actually don't have any complaints. Even on the eGPU, it's worked pretty well. I've only played for about two hours, so I don't have a ton of experience. So perhaps it gets, I don't know, maybe it doesn't work well. But this one's rated

as gold on ProtonDB, so I think that's to take. It works pretty good. Some people have had some crashes. I have not. But I love, love, love the amount of games that are available now via Proton. And when I spent a month on the Mac about a month ago now, I was shocked that the Mac has such a crappy game selection, which I believe there's actually more Steam users using the Mac. But there's, when you consider Proton, way more games available for Linux. And then when you add the fact that you can get a much wider range of gaming hardware that runs Linux. Yeah. You're not just stuck on whatever Mac you bought.

Yeah. It's way better on the Linux platform, despite what the numbers may be. What a weird switch of scenario. It really is. It's, it's. I mean, fantastic. Yeah, totally. So what have you been playing?

I've been playing Risk of Rain 2. Well, I started off playing some tabletop simulator, which I'm pleased to note does have a native Linux build, which worked beautifully. I hadn't had Steam installed for a while. I like gaming, but I'm very much a casual gamer when I have time, you know? And as many folks are doing these days, I was having a virtual video hangout with some folks,

and they were all going to start playing. I'd never played Risk of Rain 2 before. It's a third-person shooter, roguelike, a lot of fun, lots of fun enemies to shoot and kill. It looks super fun, right? And I was like, okay, well, it's been a while since I tried Proton. It has Platinum support over on ProtonDB. Let's give it a go.

Yeah, when you said you tried it, and I looked it up on ProtonDB, I said, oh, so you must have had no problem playing this. So this is where me being a little bit of a newbie to Proton maybe wasn't the best. I had just reinstalled Steam. I'd, you know, installed everything that I needed to go along with it. I tried a couple other Proton games and that worked. This one, the launcher would load up, a little scroll bar going, you know, loading the game and then nothing. Just it even, even sometimes it would say it was running, but nothing showing up on my screen. So I had to go dig in and try to enable logging and still nothing.

And eventually I found some post somewhere that reminded me I didn't have the Mesa Vulcan drivers. Oh, yeah. So one little package and then it was perfect. Yeah. And some distributions make that a little more discoverable than others. And there's other ways of installing it that sometimes pull in some of those dependencies. Right. Yeah. In this case, I was just installing Steam right out of apt. But so once that got set up? No complaints at all, and it even ran on this ThinkPad right here with integrated graphics.

I mean, I did turn the settings down a little bit, but that was fine. Worked on the Intel chip, huh? That's right. So you're one of those numbers there. And like me, your experience was probably like you would have no idea this was a wine application. Not at all. Didn't have to mess around with wine or bottles or any of that nonsense yeah yeah yeah i know i love it so much so what about you cheesy what have you been playing and is it on proton yeah it's on proton it's platinum level it's uh raft essentially you float around on a raft try not to get eaten by a

shark and you can play with i think up to four to four people. No, this sounds great. It's a super fun game. You build out your raft and you kind of float to these different islands. And then eventually you can unlock a radio that'll allow you to get beacons so you can direct toward different islands. And you essentially just pick up ocean trash the entire game and build your raft with it. It's a really fun game. Works right out of the box. I haven't had any issues, any crashes, or anything like that. Running on top of RX 580, and it's a super fun game.

I've played for hours on end with it and never had any issues. You know what I'm thinking is we need to do a game sesh between you, me, and Dylan, and get a little raft going. That sounds like something he'd love. Game on. That was his birthday today. Happy birthday, Dylan. Dylan turns 11 years old.

Wow. Which, the thing that really blows my mind about that is it was right around when he was born that I was like, I'm going serious with the whole podcasting thing. Wow. So it's been 11 years since it's been my full-time job. 11 years full-time podcasting.

Can you believe that? That doesn't seem possible. And in his world, it's totally normal, right? He's grown up with that. Like, oh yeah, my pop's just a full-time podcaster. Yeah, he's got this building we go to that's his studio for podcasting. It's really kind of remarkable.

And he and I have been loving, loving playing games via Steam on his laptop and I have it on my laptop, and it's just been awesome. So I'm really pleased with the state of Proton. I know there was some issues around, like, development capacity for it, but so far it really seems to be kicking ass. And now both AMD and NVIDIA are spending resources on development time to make games work. It's not perfect. It's not native games.

It's not the ideal scenario. But you'd be surprised how often weird abstraction layers like this exist in the gaming industry. I mean, one, it's just very technically clever. I'm very impressed with the work. And two, I mean, it might be a good long-term play in the sense of, all right,

well, once you start seeing how many folks on Linux are willing to play these games once they work, that's some good data for perhaps more native games down the line. So some really good game suggestions too. I really have been enjoying Batman Arkham City. It's a little bit on rails, but at the same time, you can fly around Arkham City and it gives you the instructions you need to feel like you're playing the game like a competent person

when you're not necessarily. So I like it if you're not as serious as a gamer. Risk of Rain 2 was Wes's. That looks like a lot of freaking fun. And then Raft, which I'm installing after the show, cheese there, will have links to their Proton pages and stuff. In the show notes at linuxunplugged.com slash 349. If you've got any great picks yourself,

why not give us an email at linuxunplugged.com slash contact. Now, there's some news that just broke that Popey brought to our attention before we hit record that Wes and I are still chewing on. And it's GitHub's huge announcement that it is now free for Teams. Nat Friedman writes on the GitHub blog, we're happy to announce we're making private repositories with unlimited collaborators available to all GitHub accounts. All of the core of GitHub features are now free for everyone to use. This means teams can now manage their work together in one place. CICD, project management, code review packages, all that, and actually a whole lot more. We want everyone to be able to ship great software on the platform developers

love. So this also very practically means I'm no longer paying a subscription for private repositories. Yeah, you got a free plan now, buddy. Hey-o. But you spotted a comment that Nat Freeman made about this on Hacker News, which I think adds some context to this. Yeah, he wrote, we've wanted to make this change for the last 18 months, but needed, and this part's key, needed our enterprise business to be big enough to enable the free use of GitHub by the rest of the world. In general, we think that every developer on Earth should be able to use GitHub for their work, so it's great to remove that as a barrier. Is it a strategic move, Computer Kid? That would make sense, since they are very competitive. Since Microsoft bought GitHub, GitLab has been kind of gaining more users since a lot of people aren't trusting

Microsoft and moving over to GitLab. So it would make sense that they're trying to get another one up. It seems like a competitive move against GitLab. And just at the end of last month, GitLab moved a bunch of stuff that had previously been in their private version over to the free version. There's also some good comparisons in that same Hacker News thread around what things you might, you know, the difference between what's free in GitLab, what's free in GitHub. So there's still some reasons you might choose one over the other. And I'll also note there's been some nuances here, as there always are. Sure, it's cheaper now, but for instance, you used to get, if you had this old pro plan, you got a certain number of action minutes for the new GitHub actions, and on the

free one, well, you get less. And it turns out to get back to that same amount, you probably have to pay two times the price. So great news in general. Go check it out for whatever your particular needs are. I think, Bitmux, you make a good point that it's in Microsoft's interest for a lot of their other ancillary service to get as many people using GitHub as possible. Yeah, I was just thinking about it. It's like, well, we host code and we solve problems and we sell software. And it's like, I have a problem. I think I'd like to see if there's a solution for it. Oh, I'll check my own product, GitHub. I'll look to see if somebody solved this problem for me. And they're already been doing that for years and years. But now they own the platform. And so if they can bring the entirety of the world's development brain some regard, too, because, I mean, this now allows teams and, you know, to possibly develop applications together where they might not have been able to do that otherwise or just couldn't afford the four bucks, the nine bucks a month to do so.

So, I mean, I see it as kind of a positive move, but I can also see the Microsoft aspect as well. And I've been following the whole GitHub and GitLab thing for a while now. So I don't think that that debate's ever going to go away personally. Right. I mean, there's always the issue of it's easier now to use a proprietary platform and that is good and maybe a little bit bad too. Yeah, but it does ultimately mean there's going to be probably more software developed and published online that's more accessible to more people. So that's good. Seems like totally kind of a net win because it makes GitLab more competitive.

It makes GitHub more competitive. It's kind of a win-win. And I also know, you know, some of the folks over at GitLab jumped in the comments too, of course. And it does seem like it's a friendly rival. You know, they're not out to get each other. No one's slashing throats here.

They're both making great products. There's use cases for everything. And thankfully, it's all powered by Git. It's true. All right. Well, let's look a little ahead because just around the corner is the release of Ubuntu 20.04. We're cooking up a review right now. Weeks in the making. going deep on this one. The current target release date is April 23rd, 2020. So it's coming up just next week. So your Linux Unplugged program will likely have its review next week for you right on the nose. It's going to feature Linux 5.4 and WireGuard is essentially pre-plumbed. At least the holes are dug, right, Wes? You actually got it going on 20.04 pretty easily. Yeah, I mean, the module's already ready for you.

So just, you know, mod pro WireGuard and away you go. And then, you know, the tools, the WireGuard tools package is just a nap to install away. Yes, that's nice. It's right there in the repo. Also, the snapshot system that's built into the ZFS file system that happens like every time you install a package, things like that, has seen a nice couple of tweaks, including one that makes it much, much, much quicker to go through the list of possible snapshots in Grub. And the way this works is you have just an entry in Grub, you select that, and that will have all of the previous snapshots, which you can boot from. And we're talking a pretty dramatic, like, 100 seconds sometimes for something to load, so well over a minute. What's wrong with my computer?

Why won't it boot? And now it's near instantaneous, which is pretty great. And I got some hands-on experience with that, which I'll try to include in my review next week. So it's coming pretty close, Wes. I know. I mean, you know, still experimental and EXT4 is, of course, the default file system still. But from when this option first appeared, I'm really impressed. And it really, I think, points the way to the glorious snapshot future that we might all have. And Popey, I believe the testing week just wrapped up. That seems like it was pretty well attended, pretty well utilized. That was great. It was a community organized test week. We always

have these test weeks, but we don't often have as much visibility and as many people participating. And Yusuf Phillips, who's active in the Ubuntu community, decided to take the bull by the horns and did a whole lot of promotion, invited a whole load of people from all the different Ubuntu flavors. So the XFCE flavors, Ubuntu and Kubuntu and so on, get them all on board. So they all promoted it individually as a central effort. And loads of people joined in and started testing this thing. And we got a whole bunch of bugs reported as a result because, you know,

who knew software has bugs? And put more work on the desktop team before the release, a week before the release. Whoopsie. But yeah, it's really good. It's really, really good. It's a model that others could follow. I love that it was community started too. That's really great. That's super cool. So we'll give you our take on that next week. Now, before we get to exposing our Telnet server to the internet and releasing the hounds onto it, we do have just a little bit of housekeeping. So I start with some unfortunate news this week.

You may have heard that we have ended the production immediately of Linux Action News, Choose Linux, and User Air, which really stings because that was a personal favorite podcast of mine. It just hurts. I loved User Air. But after a lengthy internal investigation, a cloud guru management who owns the podcast, Jupyter Broadcasting, who we are all employed by, determined that they had no choice but to terminate Joe Resington's contract with a cloud guru, which means he'll no longer be on any Jupiter Broadcasting podcast or employed by a cloud guru effective immediately. So the ramifications of that are obviously pretty dramatic. Not only do we have to immediately cease production on some shows, which I have worked on essentially for 14 years, like Linux Action News, but it also does have an impact on this show. Joe joined us, I think, in the spring of 2018, took our audio from amateur to pro. You know, it's when we went from a mixed stereo track where everybody was talking over each other.

No edits. Right to multi-track, polished, synced it up. You can tell. I mean, if you go back and listen to the archive, you can tell immediately. It's just I couldn't get it across the line on my own. And I mean, it wasn't just that. All the care he had for the audio, the mastering, the mixing, the sound,

but also the behind the scenes, the production work, the critiques of things we did wrong. Input on topics. Yeah. So his mark will always be on the show and on that ring of shows that he had there. But moving forward, Drew will be editing, and I can genuinely say he's a fantastic editor. It may sound slightly different, but I think it'll still sound great. Knowing Drew, it will. And he, if you've heard him on Choose Linux, you've heard him on this show, he's another one of these exceptional assets to our team, much like Joe was. And Drew will be taking over the editing of the show. And I have confidence in his ability

completely. But I just personally want to thank Joe for his time. One of the things that he did that was special for the show is he worked an unrealistic schedule that meant that he was up until 4 or 5 a.m. to work on the show. So that way we could get it out Tuesday night or Wednesday morning for people's commute. You can't just ask someone to shift their time zone eight hours. Yeah. And he did it so that way the audience got the show as fast as possible in the best quality as possible. And, um, I think that's been something that we're going to try to continue to do. You know, it's of course within, uh, expectations of the team's capability now, but, uh, one, one advantage that Drew has is he's not in London. He is,

he is actually here in the States. So that will help time zone wise. But Joe made a statement on late night Linux, which I recommend you go check out at late night Linux. Go subscribe in your favorite podcast catcher because it's a great show anyways, but he covers it right there. He says all that really needs to be said in that episode. So go check that out for his statement. I mean, I think there's not much more that can be said to it, right? That is just what it is. And I will be putting my focus from what I did some of the time I spent on Linux Action News into the show. One other adjustment that is happening is we are reducing the cadence of Linux headlines from every weekday to Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And some of the news that would have gone into LAN will go into headlines

so we'll just sort of divvy up some of that work and that is the state of things for now the plan is to keep trying to invest as much as we can in fact make Linux Unplugged

bigger and better than ever and that's our focus now going forward and I hope you will keep subscribed linuxunplugged.com slash subscribe and join us for the next

series of episodes like you know as a team we're just really trying to kind of put it all together still it's still new for us too uh i was not involved in the decision process so i found out after it was official and um just kind of dealing with it as as we can and that's true for all of us yeah so we're sorry it was you know it's it's, it's quick. Sometimes things go that way. It's not how we would have planned it, but that's the world we live in. Yeah. That's the, you know, we are, our intention is always, and always will be to try to give you as much notice before we wrap up a show. But one of the things I've learned about the media business is sometimes that it just does not work that way, despite your best intentions. And I felt that way super strongly since the finale of Star Trek Voyager.

Yes. Right. That was, that is, that is when I learned an important lesson that you need to brace yourself for the end of something you've been listening to or watching every week. And from that moment, which is what, 2001? I don't know. From that moment forward, it has been a core belief of mine. So we always will strive to give you as much heads up as possible. Sometimes it is outside our control, though. A little bit of good news, though. Our good friend

Heather from SciByte has rejoined us for a very special extra, the resilience of the Voyagers. These things were built to last. The Voyager probes, 42 years and counting. They probably won't be lasting much longer. In fact, we're about to enter a very crucial period where we will be dismantling some of these infrastructures that are on the planets. Yeah, the big old radio telescopes. So we will not be able to communicate. And it's all detailed in the resilience of the Voyagers about how they were built, about some of the special things about them. I tell you what, with everything going on right now, there was something about that episode I found super inspirational. So that's at extras.show slash 70.

Right on the nose. So great to talk to Heather again, too. She's the best. So you got to give that a go. And then I want to also give a plug for something that's pretty neat that's developing in the community right now. It's the LUP Lug. Our virtual Lug is also assembling an extra day in the week on Sunday. Sunday at noon Pacific. That's when we would normally do the show,

our regular live time, but on Sunday. This Sunday, myself and Cheese are going to try to make it in attendance. I think I'll be talking a little bit more about the hardware device we're using today. That's going to be something I'd like to talk about. I guess they did it last Sunday and they were saying it went for hours, but you know, people come and go as they can. So it's a virtual lug on the weekend. If you can't make it on a Tuesday, the virtual lug is assembling on the mumble spot, same spot, same bat time. It's just different bat day. And if you Google search Jupiter colony mumble, you'll get all of the information on how to connect. Just get mumumble installed from your repo and accept the fact that the certificate has expired apparently. I love that we have another great reason to get the Mumble set up,

you know, like join the lug, hang out, and then you'll be ready to go for Tuesday. I mean, I'm going to be doing it maybe with like a sparkly beverage with my feet up at the RV, I think. That's how I'm going to do it. It's going to be like totally chillax. Well, and I love that this is spawned out of the community. So the community thought, hey, let's get together and just have a lug. And I think this will be a great opportunity for everybody to learn a few little things.

And from the sounds of it, there's no itinerary. It's just free flowing. So everybody will get a chance to chime in. Sounds like a fun time. It's just nice to chat with other people that know what you're talking about when you're talking about Linux stuff. That's just a great, rewarding conversation. It'll be in the lobby of our Mumble server. So again, just Google search Jupiter Colony Mumble or join the Geek Shed IRC, irc.geekshed.net.

There is now a hashtag LUP Lug Geek Shed channel that'll be going all the time. a hashtag LUP Lug Geek Shed channel that'll be going all the time. So irc.geekshed.net, hashtag LUP Lug, and people in there will probably help you get connected to the Mumble Room if you have any problems. How great is that? Fantastic. And just a quick mention for our Telegram group at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash telegram.

That is the persistent universe of this podcast. That is where the conversation continues, even when the podcast is not being produced or released, as well as conversations around the network. JupiterBroadcasting.com slash Telegram. The persistent universe, you know, it's like an MMO, but only chatting, something like that. So we're going to do something that you really should never do. We are going to build what we think is near ideal Pine 64, Rock Pro 64 server grade setup. And I think this could be a candidate for just about anyone's home server. Anyone who needs to maybe run some Plex, some network monitoring, maybe a little authentication, some name resolution, some ad blocking. Maybe you want a self-hosted wiki, maybe a little home assistant.

All of these things on one device that takes 12 volts of power. I mean, we know you've been a little bit obsessed with these, you know, many computer boards with ARM. You've got Raspberry Pis, I think, basically everywhere in your Arduino. That's true. I do. arm. You've got Raspberry Pis, I think, basically everywhere in your RV, though. I do. And I really like the Raspberry Pi because it feels like a platform that is well-supported with a community around it. Right. Tons of guides, tons of images. I think, and you guys correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the second to that now has become

the Pine64 boards. You know, I'm happy to see that you're kind of now falling into this addiction for single board computers. I've been dealing with this for quite some time now. My shelf is full of these boards, but man, the RockPro board is one of the best boards out there right now. A great, great little machine. I'll tell you what put me over the top on it is it has a PCI Express slot. Let that sink in for a second. Yeah, PCI Express by far, man. PCI 4X. And that meant that you could put a gigabit nick in there you could put a sata expansion card in there or you could do like we did again not recommending you do this but you

could do like we did and you could get an mvme pci adapter that will take an MVME drive and click it right into that PCI slot. And then you're doing like real data transfer speeds. Right. I mean, so this had been sitting around on the shelf for a little while. We hadn't had a chance to really check it out yet. And so, of course, when we first booted it up on the SD card, well, it was slow. I mean, it felt almost somewhat perceptibly faster than the Raspberry Pi, but that's a hard thing to quantify at the command line.

It didn't really seem significantly better. And then you combine that with the network effect and community effect of the Raspberry Pi, and you start to think, well, maybe. Right. I mean, you know, you have to find different images. There's like a, you know, it's a little bit different process, and there are custom builds from members in the community. And on top of all of that, how do you tell performance when everything's waiting on the desk? So the Rock Pro 64 is special in a couple of ways. It has DDR4 RAM, LPD DDR4 RAM. So it's faster RAM than what's on the Raspberry Pi. It has

gigabit ethernet. It has an eMMC module slot. It has a full-size 4K support HDMI video out. It has USB 3. It has USB 2. And it has the 40 GPIO pins that you'd expect, as well as that PCI slot we mentioned. And a real-time clock. Okay, that's actually also worth mentioning, isn't it? Because the Pi doesn't have that, does it? Right. So that's also kind of great

and kind of nice. And Cheesy, you have been sort of trying to get me to try it out for a while, and I think the part where you convinced me was when you showed me some of the NAS boxes people are building with this thing. Pine themselves actually sell a NAS case that you can buy, but

there are tons of 3D printed cases out there for the Pine 64. And I think really what it comes down to is adding that PCIe lane, breaking that out, really kind of expands what you can do with this board. And just like you said, this would be the perfect board, even if you just slapped a couple of SATA drives in, the NAS case, I think will support two 3.5s or two 2.5s. Perfect for your little home file storage or home assistant or any sort of, you know, Shinobi or anything like that. This would be the perfect box for that. This probably would be a lot better box for my Shinobi setup at the RV. So let's get into the setup here. I want to give you a price range. And I want to challenge you

that if you're setting up a home server that is based on an x86 box right now, and you don't have more than 12 people living in your home, you need to really seriously consider what I'm talking about. But don't do what I do rounding up here in all these numbers. I'm rounding up. A power adapter, which it will not come with, will cost you $12. You need 12 volt, five amp power adapter, non-switching. I bought a 250 gigabyte MVME Western Digital Blue Drive, standby on why I went blue, $55. And then the MVME PCI adapter, $11. So my total rounding up for all of this, for a system that I think would compete with a NUC for most home server uses, 150 US greenbacks, $150 total, all in for a system that is remarkably performant.

And the other nice thing about the Rock Pro 64 four gigabyte board is it is designated by Pine64 as a long-term support board. So they're committing to supplying it for five years. So that's until 2023 at least. Which is maybe one of those factors that helps build the community of people using it. When you add in this $11 PCIe adapter and then you just snap in the blue. And I went with the one I'll have linked in the show notes because it supports the Western Digital Blue drives. And I think possibly, according to their wiki, the Pine64 PCIe MVME adapter does not support

Western Digital Blue. The reason I opted to go for blue is they have a good life cycle, but also you're not going to get the full beans with this disc on the Pine 64. The reality is the PCI bus is limited to such that you're going to get good performance, but you're not going to get high end MVME performance. So here's the numbers you're going to see. It essentially works out. What did we decide? What did we figure out was a 30 30 30 times speed difference just about yeah when we switched from an sd card to this mvme drive that took an 11 adapter and then a 55 west digital blew off amazon we went from a 22 megabyte a second transfer rate to around 610, 615 megabytes a second on average. And it peaks above that.

And when you open up the disk I.O. like that, all of a sudden you truly appreciate what the Rock Pro 64's CPU is actually capable of. It is truly I.O. bound by that SD card or eMMC, I would assume. And you just open up the floodgates, it's remarkable what you can achieve. And so we thought we'd have a little bit of fun with it here on the podcast. Right.

I mean, you said you wanted us to use it as a server. So we thought, why not set something up on Telnet that we could give out to folks that they could connect to? So are you ready for me to give out the URL? Yeah. All right. So I would encourage you, if you're listening live right now, let's see how many connections this Pine64, RockPro64 running off an MVME can take. What we have here in a container, because what else would it be, is I believe it's the Star Wars New Hope in ASCII.

That's right. The famous one, you know, you can see we've got a self-hosted version. So let's see how many ASCII streams of Star Wars The New Hope we can get going right now. Chat room, telnet to telnet.linuxunplugged.com. Everyone, telnet.linuxunplugged.com. Launch it up right now. Additionally. Three, four.

Yeah, people are joining. Are they? All right, I'm going to open up two over here. Oh, four. Yeah, people are joining. Are they? All right, I'm going to open up two over here. Oh, yeah. Okay, I got mine going, too. Now, if we can't bring this thing to its knees, we have prepared a punishment script. Oh, God. That will spawn hundreds of Telnet sessions and start this thing. Now, in our original test, off-air, we were only able to test

against the SD card, which was intrinsically bound by disk I.O. I mean, every time you launch a new client, you'd be like, alright, well, I'll wait for it to read the text off the disk. Alright, give it a go. I am currently getting the Star Wars scroll right now. Same. Yeah, I got the same. Oh, we've got,

I mean, looks like 20-plus already. Alright. And, uh, how's it doing in, uh got, I mean, looks like 20 plus already. All right. And how's it doing in net? Let's bring up the net data, Wes. Let's bring up the net data. So Wes and I are both monitoring on net data right now. Now, you've got to imagine, this thing is rendering this ASCII out and then spitting it out over Telnet to over 20 plus sessions, right? It's got to be 30 now.

It's not a super complicated task, but it's a significant task. And right now, it's sitting at a range of 8% to 14% CPU usage. Wow. And every time it's doing this, it's spinning up a whole bunch of Python in the back end, reading these files. It's actually kind of an IO-heavy workload, surprisingly, on the back end. But we're not even really cracking 14%, 11% CPU usage right now, 22% RAM usage. A consistent near 3 megabits of Telnet data is coming out of this thing right now.

Pure Telnet joy. Pure text. Pure 3 megabits of text. Do you want to launch the punishing scripts? Oh, do I? Let's do it. Now, this script will launch hundreds of Telnet sessions at the Pine 64, Rock Pro 64. We just peaked up to 24% there for a second. I'm curious, do you have a rough guess on how many connections we have there?

Because we just hit 30% there for a second. Yeah, it looks like, well, let's pop over here. My movie's still going. I mean, it's got to be 40, 50. My movie's still streaming. Yeah, mine too. What do you expect? That we get thrown out of, so the internet session is closing or what?

I don't know if it's going to freeze up or if our internet connection goes first. I'm curious to see which one it is. We're up to 32.2%, 32.6%. Actually, it's climbing pretty fast. We're now at 33% RAM usage. It seems a little slower. 35. We almost just cracked 40% GPU.

I just load 200 additional Telnet clients. I could do it. Yes, it just hit 44%. Oh, yeah. Okay. So now we have like, what, nearly 300 telnet sessions coming off this thing? I think it's getting slower now. I'll tell you, my laptop is handling it poorly.

Look at this. You can really start to see the load average increase on the box now. It's starting to get cooked. Oh, we just hit 45%. I think the internet connection's going to go. Do you have passive cooling on that one, or do you have some kind of ventilation? Just passive. Yeah, it's gone up.

Not too much. It started around like 46 or so, and now it's up to 52. It's just out in the open. Like I said, don't build it like this. I think if I was going to build this for real, I would probably try to get some sort of cooling solution on it. But I'd want it to still be quiet, so it would have to to be somewhat passive but there's no heat sink or anything on it right now i didn't get anything like that on the box so we're just using it out of the box oh oh oh we just hit 54 there on the old usage look at the net data charts it's really starting

to get up there now i wonder if i could see how many network connections we have. Will it tell me? Oh my gosh. Holy crap. We have over 419 active sessions right now on this box. Look at that line just rocking up there. And this thing's still going. I don't know if we can kill it. I don't know if

we can do it. Can that laptop handle? Can you launch another 200? I can try. Doesn't seem very convincing there. We're running into the limits of what Wes's ThinkPad can handle. What do you think, Wes? Alright, launching. If anybody listening live

has a way to spawn multiple Telnet sessions, go ahead and do it. Just give us the number in the chat room so we can... Dude, I've got like 60 of them going. Yeah. Yes! Yeah, one easy way is if you launch a whole new terminal, Telnet can be a little fussy to run in the background,

but if you just launch a whole new terminal and find whatever your terminal is for consults-e, then you can pass in the Telnet command. So now we're at 47%, 45%. We're almost halfway pegged. It's really impressive. We're at 61% RAM usage now. We did hit 130 megabytes a second on the disk IO for a brief moment, but it's settling down now because I think the batch of sessions has settled. Isn't that impressive though? I think, I think point may, I mean, you have nearly, I wonder if we could see

again. I mean, the number of connections is just staggering at this point 500 active connections could you imagine doing this back in the day oh we're up to like five megs of uh your text goodness five megs of pure text how about that isn't that something well the pine 64 rock pro Pro 64 gets such a solid nod of approval after this modification that this is what I'm buying from now on. So the other nice part is I just SSH back into the box and you can't tell anything. Right. So it's not like it's a horrible experience for the admin while this is going on. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. You guys can keep throwing at it if you want. But this is this is a game changer as far as I'm concerned. I mean, it's just for the power and the price and all of that, it's just, it's remarkable.

the system off of the MVME versus the SD card. So job one was to attach the MVME, format it, label it, and then rsync over the SD card to that, excluding like, you know, proc and things like that. But then there was another tweak that we had to make to get it to actually load from the MVME. Yeah. And maybe here's a good time to mention that we're running Manjaro ARM on this thing. Yes. Thank you. We started out with Armbian and that was working all we're running Manjaro ARM on this thing. Yes, thank you.

We started out with Armbian, and that was working all right, but Manjaro has been such a dream, partially because it already had kernel 5.6 ready to go, working perfectly, and that also meant it was really easy. Right now, we're funneling this through a droplet back here so that you don't get the studio IP, and that's just over WireGuard. That's a nice little advantage to using Manjaro on the Pine64 is that the latest kernel means WireGuard's ready to go

and so you guys have all been doing this through, you're going through a WireGuard connection and you didn't even know it. So on top of that, it's handling the crypto for WireGuard like a freaking champ I might add. So that's really impressive. And it's meant that all the various tools we needed, getting Docker up and running, getting the benchmark tools we were using going, all that was easy because it was just right there in the repo.

Yeah. And with them focusing on the Pinebook, which is essentially the same internals as far as I understand, it means that this thing's pretty much ready to go. So we grabbed, I think it was actually labeled the Pinebook image for this, which has worked just fine. To get it actually running on the NVMe was surprisingly easy. It looks like they're using the EXT Linux bootloader, at least as part of the boot chain. So really all we had to go do was modify extlinux.conf and change,

you know, at the start, it's just a label brute. So it finds that on the SD card. We just repointed that at the end of the MME drive and no problems at all. I mean, we were a little skeptical. We hadn't tried this before and we're both not that familiar with some of the booting on these ARM systems. I figured it wouldn't work. We'd have to pull the SD card off and, you know,

change things around a couple of times. Worked first time flawlessly. Yeah. And we knew instantly because it booted in a blink. We booted so fast, we're like, oh, well, that had to be it. And then, of course, we logged in and immediately confirmed it. And I got to underscore, all of this for 150 U.S. greenbacks off Amazon or wherever you get your Pine Rock Pro 64. So Manjaro was pretty great.

Having WireGuard in there is really nice. There's also a bunch of other OSs, though, Cheese. You told me about Armbian recently. Yeah, so there's Armbian that's out there that, you know, is developed for a lot of these other boards. But there are a ton of other builds available for this Rock Pro 64. I mean, if you want to get your Slackware on, your OpenMediaVault might be a great solution if you're going to use this as a NAS. CentOS, Manjaro, obviously. Straight- a great solution if you're going to use this as a nas centos manjaro obviously straight up debian if you want um you know i would like to see maybe punishing it with other things as well like i don't know throwing a mumble server on there

seeing how many we could get on there something like that you're getting you know 610 megabits a second read-write on the disk compared to the 22 that you were getting off the SD card. You'd probably get anywhere from 100 to 150 off an eMMC module. But at that 610 that you're getting off the NVMe, you could go with an SSD. It might be a little bit less expensive if you wanted to double up drives. It might cost you a little bit more money, but you're going to run around the 500 megabits a second speed on that. So you are gaining a little bit by using the NVMe. And I'm sure, like you said, whenever you initially logged in, you immediately were able to tell the difference. The Pine folks, they sell a RockPro compatible SAT adapter that has two ports on it.

So you could easily probably do that. That's a great idea. I wasn't really clear on what kind of performance I was getting. I was just going to be happy with several hundred megabytes, but I'm pretty thrilled because it's peaked above 600 too,

which is nice. I'll tell you what, I'm building everything with this for my home server stuff. I'm going to keep my Pis. I think they're great, but in the future, I'm just going to use these.

They're just that much faster. The PCI slot means that I could use them for different tasks. Wes and I are already kind of thinking about how great you could really build a router out of this thing if you just put a nice gigabit NIC in that PCI slot. Yeah, I think over the weekend, I saw Ryan Huber, one of the Nebula devs we've had on the show, and he's got himself a little Pi router. This seems like it'd be a great upgrade for that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, especially because it'd be right there on the PCI bus. It sort of sets my benchmark now for any kind of small board computer. It needs to have PCI Express.

Like, this is the game changer for me when it comes to these devices. And Manjaro has been super solid on there. I look forward to also trying Ubuntu. I don't know if Ubuntu, is there an Ubuntu image for, I don't think. Oh, no, I did. I saw an 18.04 one at least. I haven't seen a 20.04 one. One of the things the Pine64 folks have is,

I think it's a fork of Etcher that just downloads images that are compatible with the Pine64 and that you select which one you have, which model of device you have, and it downloads the image and then writes it for you to an SD card, which makes it really simple. I mean, it's a pretty big difference. I mean, an average of 610 megabytes a second versus 22. And then you're really fueling that processor. You combine that with the Gigabit NIC and it's remarkable what Linux can do on a computer that costs $80. To make this all happen,

we discovered a handy little open-source Python program called ASCII Telnet Server. Yeah, it does exactly what it sounds like. So we didn't have to go, you know, hammer some other person's server. And it's a pretty simple little Python script ready to go in a Docker container. And if you want to try it yourself,

just hit the show notes. Why wouldn't you? So everybody kind of calmed down on the old server punishment, and then Alex got in on the fun, and he spawned a thousand sessions, and for a second there, we just hit 60% load after he spawned

a thousand Telnet sessions to this thing. 10,000 sessions. I'm sorry, what? 10,000 sessions. At least that's what? 10,000 sessions. At least that's what his numbers say. Are you serious? Mm-hmm. Oh, my gosh.

That's a lot. It really is impressive. It is using 74% of the RAM now. And it is definitely loading up the CPU. Oh, man, that is really nuts. Look at that thing go. It's hitting that disk, too. That's fascinating. Every time a new batch starts, the disk that is really nuts. Look at that thing go. It's hitting that disk, too. That's fascinating.

Every time a new batch starts, the disk IO really kicks up. Yeah, there are some optimizations that could be had in this Python program. Yeah, but it seems like it's really delivering. So that's pretty neat. That was fun. Thank you, everybody, for participating. And don't do what we do. But if you do, I think you're going to be impressed with the results. All right, how about some app picks before we get out of here? This is one we've been

kicking around for a couple of weeks, but we finally had a chance to sneak it in. It's Beats and not the headphones. So yeah, this week Beats with its cute little beat icon is a media library management system for obsessive music geeks, is how they label themselves. Basically allowing you to pull all the metadata from your collection of music or media files, allow you to easily tag those with music brains, discogs, a beat port, transcode your audio into any format that you'd like, and even launch a web server from within Beats

to allow you to you know query your your music collection that way you can listen to your tracks there provided you know you have an html5 browser which you wouldn't um you know it's a great little tool command line basically and uh get in there tag all your music and and get it all sorted up the way you like to have your music tagged and sorted. And I think it's a cool little app. I think it's perfect for people who are obsessive about tagging their music and wanting their tags to be correct or at least consistent. So get out there and give it a shot. Very nice. That is something I will check out. It's Beats, B-E-A-T-S,

and we'll have a link in the. That is something I will check out. It's Beats, B-E-A-T-S. And we'll have a link in the notes if you want to check that out. It is nice to have that stuff figured out. I know I've got some old music collection and I just kind of stay away from it because I know it's a mess. Yeah. It's MIT licensed too,

so have at it, Haas. It's all yours. That's pretty nice. Well, there you go. That's our episode for today. Be sure to check out the Ubuntu podcast where you can get more poppy. Be sure to check out TechSnap where you can get Wes Payne along with Jim Salter. And check out my personal site, chrislast.com, where I have new projects and whatnots over there as well as Self Hosted where a lot of the stuff about things you run yourself on your own infrastructure or where you make compromises and host in the cloud are discussed on the self-hosted podcast at self-hosted.show.

Any other business, Wes? Maybe you have some homework to finish watching Star Wars after the show. I like this whole outfit. This quarantine outfit's good. I didn't know they sold quarantine outfits sort of styled as a pimp suit. It looks good on you. I mean, it's getting a little warm, but thankfully it's sealed up, so you can't smell anything. Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of nice. It's kind of nice. Although that hole in the face mask so you can use the microphone seems like it invalidates the entire point. I'll have to look up the science on that.

Yeah, I noticed you coughing into the mic, too. I don't like that. Check out linuxunplugged.com slash 349 for notes for everything we talked about. Please join us live next Tuesday. We love having you here. It makes it that much better at jblive.tv, noon Pacific. And, of course, we're in that mumble room this Sunday at noon. See you next Tuesday. Thank you. Well, we've now hit 82%, 86% on the Rock Pro 64 at 98% memory usage.

Wow. I can't believe we haven't run out of sockets yet. This is unbelievable, really. Oh, up to 61 degrees Celsius. And how is NetData even still responding? I don't even understand. NetData, you're the best. How is this happening right now?

What are we doing to accomplish 81% CPU usage? Oh, we're starting to get drops in the data. I just got my first drop in the data, so we're really getting there now. 98.1% memory usage, by the way. We are doing a consistent 253 megabits of disk reading can i just read these stats for a second 82 percent cpu usage 253 megabits consistently from the disk 98.1 ram and i think it may have just finally locked up are you still on the console over there are you still ssh'd in yeah's still responding. Looks like net data has died. I just got kicked.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, I got dropped too. Ah, this is so bad. I was just in the middle of the movie.