Intro - Tristan Ross

Introductions/Bios
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Name: Tristan Ross
Title/Job Description: Founder of Midstall Software
Company: Midstall Software
Location/Country: Southern California, United States
First AArch64 device: Raspberry Pi 2b
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tristan-ross-5408141aa/
Twitter Handle: x.com
Other Social Media: https://tristanxr.com/
Favorite Book/Movie/Song/TV Show: Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack

I’m a maintainer of several packages for the nix package manager, including Flutter and LLVM. After getting a 2021 MBP M1 Pro, I decided to move to aarch64 once I saw the performance ARM offers nowadays. In July of 2024, I got a 64 core Ampere Altra system. It has been very beneficial in my work with NixOS as I am able to build many packages at once. I initially heard of Ampere from Jeff Geerling and seeing the benefits ARM offers nowadays is very intriguing. Alternatives to x86 like ARM and RISC-V are things I’m very interested in.

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Welcome! What do you use your 64-core system for? Primarily package building, or do you also use it for general purpose computing, development work, etc?

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Yeah, my 64 core system is mainly used as a workstation. I’ll often push package builds to it with Nix since my M1 Pro MBP doesn’t have enough resources for large packages like LLVM and Firefox. I also write Zig code on it.

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Did you target x86 when compiling your stuff on 64-core ARM, or did you just use ARM to target arm64?

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Which graphics card you use in Ampere box?

Are you running mainline kernel or locally patched one?

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I only target aarch64 on my Ampere system.

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Radeon RX 6800, mainline kernel 6.8.12.

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