LeMaker HiKey960 boards arrived (was: Re: [Reproducible-builds] arm64 reproducible build network)

[Axel Beckert]

Hi,

Holger Levsen wrote on 24 Mar 2016:
> On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 06:40:09PM -0700, Vagrant Cascadian wrote:
> > There's about US$1200 left.
> > 
> > To follow through with number of boards in the original proposal, I
> > should probably get at least 3-4 more boards... or should we branch out
> > into an arm64 network with the remaining funds?
> 
> tbm will give us something like 4 cello boards (iirc), but it will take some
> months as they are only scheduled in the 2nd quarter of 2016. These are
> to be hosted at Xtaran.

Long story short: 14 months passed and we didn't get any LeMaker Cello
boards (http://www.96boards.org/product/cello/). But around pentecost
we got a mail that we will get LeMaker HiKey960 boards
(http://www.96boards.org/product/hikey960/) instead and that they
more or less already got shipped.

The boards were sponsored by Hewlett Packard Enterprise
(https://www.hpe.com/) and will be hosted by the students association
SOSETH (https://sos.ethz.ch/) at ETH Zurich (https://www.ethz.ch/).

So in general I'd say: 8 smaller, but more modern boards are better
than no boards at all. :-)

But I nevertheless wasn't really sure how well it will work out for us
with that model swap. But at the time I got informed about the swap,
the boards seemed already being shipped.

The main difference between the Cello and the HiKey/HiKey960 boards is
that the Cello board fulfils the 96boards Enterprise Edition (EE)
specifications while the Hikey/Hikey960 are 96boards Consumer Edition (CE)
boards.

But the most severe implication of this switch from a EE to a CE board
I noticed only at home when I got my hands dirty on one of the boards:
The Consumer Edition does not have any Ethernet RJ45 port, only wifi.
:-(

I don't think we want to rely on wifi, so we likely will also need 8x
USB 3.0 (A, not C) Gigabit Ethernet adapters, probably around 20€-30€
each. *sigh*

> For those we will need to get SSDs too, so leaving some funds for that
> would be useful.

They have an PCIe M.2 slot, but also 32 GB "UFS Flash" on board. The
current idea (by Holger) is to add a 120GB/128GB M.2 SSD to each board
for additional storage.

I've tried to get Debian installed on one of these HiKey960 boards.
The small fact sheet points you to the more or less empty
http://wiki.lemaker.org/HiKey960 -- it only contains a link to
http://wiki.lemaker.org/HiKey960:Differences_between_HiKey960_and_HiKey620

The HiKey620 boards are what was formerly known solely as "HiKey". But
the difference in there don't list all differences.

For example so far I noticed the following things not listed on that
page:

* No more jumpers but DIP switches.
* No more seems to be able to boot from SD card. At least I didn't
  manage it if I follow the instructions for the HiKey620 boards.

Later I found
https://github.com/96boards/documentation/tree/master/ConsumerEdition/HiKey960
and its sub pages.
https://github.com/96boards/documentation/blob/master/ConsumerEdition/HiKey960/GettingStarted/README.md
more or less confirms this:

* Flashing a new OS needs to be done over the USB C OTG socket with
  Android style fastboot/adb methods. :-( As far as I understand it,
  that means I have to flash an image and can't use the Debian
  Installer for that. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)

* As I don't have an appropriate USB-A to USB-C cable I'll first have
  to buy one. Afterwards I can see if I can get anything working on
  these boards.

  At least the manufacture currently only lists AOSP as available for
  the Hikey960 while you also can get Linaro and "Debian" images for
  the Hikey620.

So far for today. More maybe tomorrow.

		Regards, Axel
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert <abe at debian.org>, http://people.debian.org/~abe/
: :' :  |  Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin
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