Since I hope to be developing more and more projects on aarch64 after the success of the 2019 Nvidia Jetson experiement; it was time to try the new homegrown Raspberry Pi 4 8GB.
It turns out with the addition of a 500 GB M1 SSD in an Argon One M1 case with some cooling and the installation of Ubuntu 20.10 booting via USB this thing is a desktop replacement for about 150 (the ssd was excessive but hey).
I installed bare Ubuntu server since I do most development using ssh, tmux and emacs-nox keeping my working environment consistent on all platforms remote or local and needing to access to a fairly standard set of dev libraries. Ubuntu supports aarch64 really well and is a first class citizen on the Pi. Indeed with a simple setup it is possible to boot from the USB-3 connected SSD without the microSD card with the latest Pi firmware so configured. I’d rather be using NixOS but that’s for another day.
With ghc-8.10 installed and cabal-3.4, qbe, llvm-9 and all seems well so basically I have all the tooling I need to get started on some language development for this architecture.
I Must take a look at RISC-V next and get busy with tooling up an FPGA bench.