Intro - Manawyrm

Name: Manawyrm
Title/Job Description: Cloud Infrastructure Engineer
Company: Hetzner Cloud
Location/Country: Germany
First AArch64 device: iPhone 5S
First general purpose AArch64 device: Raspberry Pi 3
Twitter Handle: manawyrm
Favorite Book/Movie/Song/TV Show: The Cuckoo’s Egg/Matrix (1999)/It’s A Hard Life/MythBusters

Hey!

my name is Manawyrm, working at Hetzner Cloud as a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer.
Recently, I’ve been integrating Arm64 virtualization support into our Cloud environment as part of the Platform team.

Our experience in integrating the Ampere Altra devices into our platform was (almost unexpectedly) pretty much pain-free. The UEFI/ACPI environment felt like just another server, just with different binaries.

I had previously used Ampere Altra servers to run a larger cluster for internal applications (PostgreSQL, nginx, Django, etc.) with a lot of success.

Arm has quickly managed to become my daily driver platform on basically all devices I use (laptop, router, cable modem, NAS, phone, tablet, etc.).

In my spare time, I like to work on portable Arm64 devices like the Pinebook Pro, RockPro64 and ODROID-GO Advance.

I have a bit of a faible for weird and wonderful CPU architectures and like to use and work with devices with weird ones (SuperH? CR16C? )

I’d love to see some work done on the PCIe controllers (memory without nGnRE!) and newer cores with support for features like Nested Virtualization! Excited to see and try the new and upcoming generations of Ampere CPUs!

Saw a bunch of familiar names in the Introductions, so Hi everyone!

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Welcome!!
I would love a lot more detail about how you and Hetzner got the servers up and running and what issues you had and how you solved them. If you have any blogs please post a link to them!

The Cuckoo’s Egg - I loved that book! Cliff’s a seriously energetic guy. I met him when I picked up a few Klein Bottles from his house. He gave me an hour’s talk on detecting methane rain in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere using Doppler shift in radio signals.

That’s super cool! I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting him yet…
My personal connection to the book/story is that I was born in the german city where it all took place :slight_smile:
Was actually talking to one of the people involved a couple of days ago (they’re restoring vintage computer equipment nowadays).

We might have to think about setting up a blog for this kind of post, but in general, the experience was pleasantly simple. Most of the challenges were related to arm64 support in general (building packages/containers/system images) and updating our application/business logic.

Apart from the usual back and forth with the board vendors (to sort out the usual IPMI/BMC issues), things just pretty much worked fine.

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Hello and welcome @Manawyrm :wave:

Nice choice of weird CPUs :wink:

I don’t have your knowledge about CPUs, but I have fond memories of writing assembly language for the Saturn processor… Those were good times. :smiley:

Anyhow, enjoy your stay! :+1:

Great to see you here, Manawyrm!

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