Honeycomb LX2

C

cmoerz

Today, I've gone down the rabbit hole on Solid Run's Honeycomb LX2.

For those who don't know it - it's an ARM based workstation, that looks very promising and reasonably priced.
www.solid-run.com

ARM Servers & Networking | Boards & Workstations | SolidRun

SolidRun Arm-based platforms offer low-power, high-bandwidth, fast connectivity with advanced performance. Our Arm-based platforms offer low-latency, low-power, high-bandwidth, fast connectivity with advanced performance, efficiency, and cost.
www.solid-run.com www.solid-run.com

I'm uncertain though, how well FreeBSD will work on it? The accounts on the mailing list and documentation on Solid Run's website are spotty at best.

Does anyone have any experience with it and would be willing to share it?
  • does it work, i.e. with 13.0-RELEASE? 13.0-STABLE?
  • does it boot with UEFI?
  • what graphics cards work? that in particular seems to be rather difficult to assess and answer - apart from the ongoing insanity of graphics card prices
  • does the onboard Gbit LAN work?
Performance wise, it appears to be around 6x faster than a Raspberry Pi, very good at number crunching but not so good in the I/O and memory access performance department. Otherwise, it looks great all around - SATA ports, up to 64GB RAM, M2... all typical workstation stuff.
 
cmoerz said:
does it boot with UEFI?
Click to expand...

<https://developer.solid-run.com/knowledge-base/honeycomb-lx2k/#specifications> work in progress but does this mean WIP in a Linux context? Or just WIP? I suspect the latter:

1641003865624.png


cmoerz said:
what graphics cards work?
Click to expand...

<https://developer.solid-run.com/knowledge-base/honeycomb-clearfog-cx-installation-and-tips/#gpus> a couple of GPUs mentioned in a Linux context.

cmoerz said:
13.0-RELEASE? 13.0-STABLE?
Click to expand...

From the tables of available packages, I imagine that stable/13 will be better – for compatibility with drm-devel-kmod.
 
I actually prefer SolidRuns ITX offering here:
shop.solid-run.com

ClearFog CN9130 Single Board Computer | Marvell CN9130 SBC | SolidRun

The ClearFog CN9130 Base/Pro based on the Marvell OCTEON CN9130 SoC and offer next generation computing and networking performance, power and connectivity options. Both of the platforms offer unique features such as dual LTE support, quad core Cortex A72 CPUs and advanced security, encryption...
shop.solid-run.com shop.solid-run.com


This does sound promising for the LX2
What this means is that HoneyComb running our tianocore edk2 based firmware will boot and run on most Aarch64 operating systems out of the box.
Click to expand...
This platform seems more expensive. How does it stand up in CPU benchmarking? Number of cores?

Macchiato is now 5 years old. So that is dated.
 
cmoerz : According to https://www.freebsd.org/platforms/, 13-RELEASE is definitely supported on aarch64 (the Honeycomb LX2). I'd discourage trying to attach a graphics card, though - you probably can do that, but the connectors look rather awkward, I think you may end up buying an adapter to connect a GPU to your HoneyComb. I would imagine that IOT stuff has decent quality networking hardware. Just my 2 cents after looking at the board. I can imagine that those IOT boards are what's running those video ads by Nike on the Jumbotron in Times Square or the Sony stuff at Shibuya Crossing.
 
The honeycomb board is supposed to no longer be an IOT board - hence, I was looking at graphics cards as well. The CPU package has 16 cores and macchiato bin is somewhat around 4.5 times "slower", OverDrive about 3.75 times.

At least, according to this thread on the arm mailing list (obviously, take it with a grain of salt, please), which takes world+kernel compile times as measurement:

There seems to be some serious oumph in this package, even if it doesn't look it.

I couldn't find anything about that UEFI package. I watched a Youtube video, in which one of the devs said you put the UEFI firmware into the sd card slot. Couldn't find any UEFI details or downloads though, which makes me think it might not be ready for prime time yet.

Don't feel like fiddling with u-boot, device trees and all that stuff, that makes the RPI so much "fun" in regards to the boot configuration.

So, I think a VGA card should work. I'm just unsure whether just any regular joe card will do or whether it needs a special one, because there's a bunch of postings out there that point towards compatibility issues with the UEFI firmware. And not finding much else about that UEFI firmware bothers me enough to not consider getting one (yet?).
 
cmoerz said:
Today, I've gone down the rabbit hole on Solid Run's Honeycomb LX2.

For those who don't know it - it's an ARM based workstation, that looks very promising and reasonably priced.
www.solid-run.com

ARM Servers & Networking | Boards & Workstations | SolidRun

SolidRun Arm-based platforms offer low-power, high-bandwidth, fast connectivity with advanced performance. Our Arm-based platforms offer low-latency, low-power, high-bandwidth, fast connectivity with advanced performance, efficiency, and cost.
www.solid-run.com www.solid-run.com

I'm uncertain though, how well FreeBSD will work on it? The accounts on the mailing list and documentation on Solid Run's website are spotty at best.

Does anyone have any experience with it and would be willing to share it?
  • does it work, i.e. with 13.0-RELEASE? 13.0-STABLE?
  • does it boot with UEFI?
  • what graphics cards work? that in particular seems to be rather difficult to assess and answer - apart from the ongoing insanity of graphics card prices
  • does the onboard Gbit LAN work?
Performance wise, it appears to be around 6x faster than a Raspberry Pi, very good at number crunching but not so good in the I/O and memory access performance department. Otherwise, it looks great all around - SATA ports, up to 64GB RAM, M2... all typical workstation stuff.
Click to expand...
FreeBSD works fine on the Honeycomb.
It should work on 13.X, I only use -current but I don't see why it wouldn't work on 13.X
arm64 only supports booting with UEFI
Nvidia GPU are not supported, you'll need a "recent" AMD GPU (polaris architecture IIRC)
The onboard LAN doesn't work, same for the SFP+ slots. You'll have to put a usb ethernet adapter or an usb wlan adapter.
Warning, it only supports 1.2v RAM modules.
 
astyle said:
cmoerz : According to https://www.freebsd.org/platforms/, 13-RELEASE is definitely supported on aarch64 (the Honeycomb LX2). I'd discourage trying to attach a graphics card, though - you probably can do that, but the connectors look rather awkward, I think you may end up buying an adapter to connect a GPU to your HoneyComb. I would imagine that IOT stuff has decent quality networking hardware. Just my 2 cents after looking at the board. I can imagine that those IOT boards are what's running those video ads by Nike on the Jumbotron in Times Square or the Sony stuff at Shibuya Crossing.
Click to expand...
I put a RX550 on my honeycomb without problem.
 
cmoerz said:
The honeycomb board is supposed to no longer be an IOT board - hence, I was looking at graphics cards as well. The CPU package has 16 cores and macchiato bin is somewhat around 4.5 times "slower", OverDrive about 3.75 times.

At least, according to this thread on the arm mailing list (obviously, take it with a grain of salt, please), which takes world+kernel compile times as measurement:

There seems to be some serious oumph in this package, even if it doesn't look it.

I couldn't find anything about that UEFI package. I watched a Youtube video, in which one of the devs said you put the UEFI firmware into the sd card slot. Couldn't find any UEFI details or downloads though, which makes me think it might not be ready for prime time yet.

Don't feel like fiddling with u-boot, device trees and all that stuff, that makes the RPI so much "fun" in regards to the boot configuration.

So, I think a VGA card should work. I'm just unsure whether just any regular joe card will do or whether it needs a special one, because there's a bunch of postings out there that point towards compatibility issues with the UEFI firmware. And not finding much else about that UEFI firmware bothers me enough to not consider getting one (yet?).
Click to expand...
The images are here: https://images.solid-run.com/LX2k/lx2160a_uefi
 
Well, it all looks great on the surface; if you try to buy it on their website, they push a paypal account on you and the payment fails. I'm now in support hell with Paypal in an attempt to close the account.

So, as a word of caution to anybody considering buying it - I highly recommend waiting for another payment option. This is a major pita that does not seem to work.
 
cmoerz said:
Well, it all looks great on the surface; if you try to buy it on their website, they push a paypal account on you and the payment fails. I'm now in support hell with Paypal in an attempt to close the account.

So, as a word of caution to anybody considering buying it - I highly recommend waiting for another payment option. This is a major pita that does not seem to work.
Click to expand...
If you need that brand of the board, you can try looking for a reseller, and may have to settle for second-hand.
 
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