Anyone have an arm64 dev box they like?

I'd just be SSHing into it and running builds/tests, so pretty much just something well supported by standard distros would be ideal (and runs KVM, so I can test kernels). It'd be within earshot so I'd like it to be somewhat quiet, and ideally have some way to get decently fast storage/networking on it.

@palmer Let me know what you learn; I'm suffering with qemu on an x86 machine because AWS VMs don't support KVM guests.

@keithp @palmer ditto. Having a real /dev/kvm is mostly what I tend to need across different archs. Something with a GPU would be nice, too.

@palmer pi5 16GB with nvme is close to that "it rather just works" without costing an arm/leg

@zygoon
Where do you get 16GB pi5s that don't cost an arm and a leg??
@palmer

@palmer Long shot, but the #Jolla phone 2026?

@zygoon I'm seeing $400 (without NVMe) as the best in-sock option? That's crazy for a Raspberry Pi, it's just a 4xA76 -- so I'd need like 8 of them to match the performance of a modern Mac Mini?

@khleedril I like weird phones so I might get one as a phone, but doesn't really seem competitive as a dev box.

@palmer I've been using the Dell GB10 for a while. Aside from some initial driver issues and the USB-C ports being too close together for some USB-A adapters, it's been quite stable in Fedora.

@vathpela I'm seeing $5500 for a 10-core X925 with 128GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD? I definitely don't need the GPU or that much RAM, I'm just going to run CPU stuff on it.

I'm seeing some of the Snapdragon X stuff with 32GB of RAM for $1300, which seems like a better fit for what I'd be doing in terms of configuration. I have no idea if they're any good, though...

@palmer yeah, prices are insane. Don't try to do parity, it's just a convenient slow small platform that happens to have working kvm

@palmer I think in general the issue is outside of apple, the people making desktopy sorts of devices think you're gonna run cuda.

@palmer would a cluster of arm64 phones work? probably cheap to get second hand phones and run postmarketos on them (eg. oneplus 6/6t runs close to mainline linux now. postmarketos wiki has other devices that may suit ur needs). might need additional setup that may/may not be worth ur time

or maybe https://system76.com/autonomous-vehicles/?

@palmer I would argue that Apple's M2 generation (mini or studio, depending on budget) is still the better than any alternative today, but they are very hard to find new, and even the used ones are still quite expensive. My main problem is that they the machines are not meant to be user-serviceable: once you have dust build up in the fans, the warranty requires your to either wait until the magic dust comes out or mail it to an official repair shop and pay them to clean it.

@arnd ya, the best option being out-of-production hardware that had to be reverse engineered is kind of a bummer. They just seem to beat everything else around, though: they're really the only ones building chips that make sense for what I'm trying to do, and their CPU design is so far ahead of all the other Arm vendors that even the old stuff is still competitive...

@vathpela I guess that's probably a sane business decision, it's just no fun ;)