I’ve assembled a list of useful single board computers (SBCs) for use in homelabs. They are essentially low power computers useful for lightweight tasks and experimentation. I’ve used them (and still do) for certain tasks, especially when I’ve wanted to experiment with various things on the ARM64 platforum. FriendlyARM NanoPi M4 (6 ARM64 cores, 2/4GB LPDDR3/LPDDR4 RAM) – a really useful board for storage applications. It features a PCI Express interface, allowing for multiple SATA ports using the SATA hat or an NVMe drive using the NVMe hat.

This tutorial will show you how to install a virtualization stack consisting of KVM, QEMU and libvirt on Alpine Linux, with support for both AMD64 and ARM64 based computers. Alpine Linux is “an independent, non-commercial, general purpose Linux distribution designed for power users who appreciate security, simplicity and resource efficiency”. It’s incredibly lightweight and is useful for both containers and virtual machines, as both host and as guest. Due to it’s small size, it’s able to run on everything from MicroServers to Threadripper based workstations.

This tutorial will show you how to easily remove the desktop interface from your NVIDIA Jetson Nano Developer Kit to run it in headless mode. This can be useful for using the NVIDIA Jetson Nano as a small low-power server with machine learning capabilities. The NVIDIA Jetson Nano is a really powerful little single board computer, with a Quad Core ARM64 CPU, 4GB LPDDR4 RAM and a 128 core NVIDIA Tegra (Maxwell based) GPU, all while using as little as 5 watts.

This article will show how to compile ZFS on Linux 0.8.2 on Ubuntu 18.04 on ARM64, specifically the FriendlyElec NanoPi M4 single board computer, which has a four port SATA HAT available. It works great on other single board computers too, and I’ve successfully compiled and used ZFS on the Raspberry Pi. These instructions will most likely work on other architectures supported by ZFS on Linux, such as x86_64.