Bought myself an Ampere Altra system

OP works for Red Hat, and some of the tests require booting systems with 64k pages.

What surprises me more is why Red Hat doesn't provide them with the proper hardware..

Red Hat has dozens of internal aarch64 machines (similar to the one in the article) that can be reserved, but sometimes you just want a machine of your own to play with.

> some of the tests require booting systems with 64k pages

OK, but then why an 80-core CPU?

@lisper because Q32 is more expensive than Q64 and I got offer for Q80 one.

Amount of options for sensible AArch64 hardware is too small (or too expensive).

OK, this is something I know very little about so you may have to explain it like I'm a complete noob, but I still don't understand why, if all you want to do is boot 64-bit Linux, you couldn't use, say, a Raspberry Pi 4 instead of spending thousands of zloties on an 80-core machine that requires industrial cooling.

Read https://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/2025/06/20/the-hunt-for-a-... please.

Tool vs Toy.

Thanks!

We have access to many, such as the TestFarm, or machines you can reserve on what is called Beaker.

Note: Recently also purchased an Ampere machine with some other people. Just to play around and host stuff.

A lot of these ARM boards use custom (read: outdated) kernels and proprietary boot methods, so I'm not really sure how applicable they are to people developing Linux distributions that work everywhere. NixOS, for example, is only supporting UEFI booting on ARM64 going forward. If Redhat has the same policy, then there is only a limited set of arm64 boards available. I researched this recently as I'd like to move my k8s cluster from renting expensive cloud machines to running them on cheap machines at home, and the situation is ... difficult. (I have tested the Orange Pi 5 Max and the Radxa Rock 5B+. Both required me to hack edk2-rk3588, but they do work well now that most rk3588 support is merged in Linux 6.15/6.16-rc1. But, this is an old CPU and is just now getting mainline kernel support, and that is always how arm has felt. It is, however, kind of neat to see a "BIOS" on an ARM board. I hope it catches on.)