Re: NetBSD/evbarm 8.99.41 Amazon AMIs

[Jared McNeill <jmcneill%invisible.ca@localhost>]

On Thu, 23 May 2019, Swift Griggs wrote:

> * Does this mean that one can rent a hosted Amazon ARM-based VM that is
>  already pre-setup with NetBSD from Amazon ?

Yes, although the NetBSD is "from NetBSD" in this case.

> * Does TNF benefit from that at all ? Just curious if it's kinda like when
>  you follow an Amazon link and the link host gets a small consideration.

The benefit is more people can run NetBSD :)

> * Are they fast?

Compared to most ARM SBCs, yes :)

> * What kind of ARM hardware do they use or is it Qemu or what do you know
>  about that (esp network interface type) ?

Amazon's own AWS Graviton processors: 
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-ec2-instances-a1-powered-by-arm-based-aws-graviton-processors/

They are using hardware virtualization, so it is not like running Qemu on 
a PC at all.

> * What would you consider a typical use-case for these ?

ISTR the cost of an a1 instance is around half of a similarly spec'd x86 
instance.

Cheers,
Jared