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TomjNorthIdaho
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Why is there not a CHR ISO for bare metal ?

Wed Apr 24, 2019 7:57 pm

Question: Why is there not a CHR ISO for bare metal ?

For several years now, Mikrotik's 64-Bit ROS ( CHR ) has been a decent product , however , Mikrotik's CHR only runs in a virtual environment (such as VMware ESXi as an example) - and - Mikrotik's CHR does not run directly on a bare metal system. Also there is no CHR install CD-ISO.

So now for my question --> Why does Mikrotik not make a CHR CD-ISO for a bare-metal installation ?

Yea yea yea - I know there is an x86 32-Bit version of ROS that can run on bare-metal.
However , the 32-Bit x86 ROS is NOT the same as a 64-Bit ROS. There are some differences between the two , such as maximum memory, 64-Bit instructions …

Somewhere there is a reason why ….

North Idaho Tom Jones
 
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Re: Why is there not a CHR ISO for bare metal ?

Thu Apr 25, 2019 2:42 pm

CHR is a virtual appliance where MT can deliver a product to a plattform they know. They only have to deal with drivers from each hypervisor and hardware drivers are maintained by the hypervisor. This makes the support much much easier to handle as the number of scenarios for drivers is limited. So CHR is a packaged x86 64 bit ROS.
If you add hardware drivers to this as you would have for a bare metal it will become more complex to support in the end. This is my guess anyway.

What you want is x86 64 bit installation which is rather absent. I would however prefer a virtual environment CHR over bare metal every day due to operational advantages.
 
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Re: Why is there not a CHR ISO for bare metal ?

Fri Apr 26, 2019 7:28 pm

CHR is a virtual appliance where MT can deliver a product to a plattform they know. They only have to deal with drivers from each hypervisor and hardware drivers are maintained by the hypervisor. This makes the support much much easier to handle as the number of scenarios for drivers is limited. So CHR is a packaged x86 64 bit ROS.
If you add hardware drivers to this as you would have for a bare metal it will become more complex to support in the end. This is my guess anyway.

What you want is x86 64 bit installation which is rather absent. I would however prefer a virtual environment CHR over bare metal every day due to operational advantages.
Re: They only have to deal with drivers from each hypervisor and hardware drivers are maintained by the hypervisor
The drivers missing in CHR for bare-metal are likely 100 percent the same exact drivers already built into x86 and they have been there since day one of x86. There is nothing to deal with when adding the drivers from x86 into CHR. The base "Linux" system is identical except for CHR is mostly built using a 64-bit compiler.

Re: If you add hardware drivers to this as you would have for a bare metal it will become more complex to support in the end
I disagree , the hardware drivers for bare-metal are already running good on x86

Re: … virtual environment CHR over bare metal every day due to operational advantages
For a smaller ISP , sure a CHR may fit in well - however - If you are running thousands (tens of thousands) of FW rules & BGP & OSPF & bandwidth management for many 10-Gig networks , then a physical bare-metal platform with 50+ Xeon CPU cores is necessary.

Check out the license costs for any hyper-visor (VMware ESXi or other) for a virtual platform that can assign 50+ CPUs to a guest hosted system. $$$$$$$$

Note - PfSense can do just about everything Mikrotik ROS can do - and also run on bare-metal with 100+ cores. However, I prefer Mikrotik when possible.

I just don't see a valid reason to hinder and limit CHR from performing at greater capacity loads with more throughput on bare-metal ????

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Re: Why is there not a CHR ISO for bare metal ?

Sat Apr 27, 2019 7:46 pm

Native CHR would be great and all they need to do is to build CHR with full Linux kernel with all modules that are available. Yes, it will make it much bigger, but we aren't talking embedded here. It's perfectly fine to have big fat kernel or thousands of modules.
This would enable support for all modern 10GigE cards and all other hardware that you can just normally use in Linux, but not in CHR or native x86 ROS.
But there might be some issue with how deep various MK features are implemented. I don't think you would have to modify every single wired ethernet module, but who knows.
I have looked over GPL code that Mikrotik provides and there doesn't seems to be any massive changes in network adapter modules, it's all mostly related to embedded platforms.

Maybe someone from Mikrotik will read this thread and maybe they will try to do this... even if such build would be offered as "testing" or with disclaimer some drivers may not work at all... it would still be interesting experiment. Having to use supervisor just to run single operating system is just stupid and wastes resources.
 
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Re: Why is there not a CHR ISO for bare metal ?

Tue Apr 30, 2019 1:20 am

Please note that I said support and not work. The drivers are most lightly there but in term of support for MT it is a huge difference.
Granted that hypervisors can cost but there are cheaper and even free hypervisors out there. Hyper-V is free and has max vcpu per guest of 64.

For raw performance when needed I would avoid X86 (server) and go for dedicated hardware from a vendor that has warranty for its performance numbers.

But I think we are more or less saying the same thing but with different words. I say keep CHR dedicated for virtual environments and provide a real X86 64 bit installation for bare metal installation. Two different SCUs from MT but the same core. Less confusion in term of procurement and support.
 
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Re: Why is there not a CHR ISO for bare metal ?

Tue Apr 30, 2019 10:52 am

I see this topic coming up time and again on here. Long & short of it is why no x64 build?
The more I read about people wanting it the more I agree with them, I like many use the free ESXi installation and then visualise under that and would have happily ran x86 had it not been for the licensing system. CHR is so much more flexible for licensing.

Maybe one day but I can't help but feel they won't spend time developing x64 as "CHR is available use that" is often the advice.

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