Running a Full Node and Staking on Free and Open Standard RISC-V Hardware

Transcript

[music] [music] [music] >> In the next 5 minutes, I'm going to talk about running a node on RISC-V hardware, but what what does a RISC-V computer look like? On the left side, you see more or less what I have under my desk at home. It's just a palm-sized board, has a CPU, RAM, SSD connection on the bottom, various other If you want, you can have it in a nice enclosure, so it looks like a computer you might know.

But, what's actually different? It's the CPU. Most people probably know Intel AMD CPUs. They've been around since the end of the '70s, more or less. Then there is ARM, another big family of CPUs. Anyone with a license bought by ARM can build them. They have been around since the mid-'80s, somewhere around there. If you have an Apple computer, you have an ARM CPU in your cell phones, tons of them. And what I'm going to talk about is RISC-V, and the difference is there's no license attached to it, so anyone can produce them.

Already 2 years ago at Devcon in Bangkok we tried to run a full node on Ethereum. We didn't succeed, but we made some progress. We were barely managed to run the smallest of test nets, but it was a lot of fun to play with hardware, improve codes, clients, and everything. And it was nice to play around with these things. In the last 2 years, there was a lot of progress. For example, I love how Lighthouse works out of the box, thanks to a community member.

Etherex execution client is a new one, just compiles. Thinking is a bit hairy, but works. Eth Docker runs perfectly on RISC-V now. So, now we have Geth, Etherex, Nimbus, and lighthouse running. What improved from the network side or from the other side is a we have fewer validators, less overhead. Some crypto libraries now have assembly code for risk five. Um more importantly, risk five hardware has become very powerful.

So, it's now possible to run a full node on mainnet. So, what you see here on the top is CPU usage over time. You see it spikes every time a slot comes in has to do some calculations. But, it's not really overloading the CPU. So, you see you can run a full node on it. But, I also run a validator through it and on the right side you see the highlighted epoch. The attest attestation was in the first slot. That's normally the hardest one to get right even on more powerful hardware.

But, what you see there is it attest perfectly, did all the calculations properly. So, risk five hardware can easily handle the load of Ethereum mainnet now. And finally, I talked to the guy who did the ENR scout and we looked at all the 15,000 Ethereum mainnet nodes in the network and looked what kind of hardware they're using. And there's only one risk five node and it's under my desk and it's still running.

It's kind of it's a good start. Let's say like that. But, it's nice to see. Um and what's the possible futures? In my expectations, there's no license cost. So, hardware should potentially be cheaper. This is not true in the current hardware market. Definitely not. Then, CK proving might brings CPU usage down as well. So, it makes risk five more competitive. And more of an interesting one, whenever risk five instructions have to be used in the Ethereum protocol, you could imagine that at least that part runs natively on the risk five core.

And you could even imagine optimizing the that core specifically for these tasks. So you would have kind of an ASIC running an Ethereum node. So with this I conclude my talk and I'm open for questions. Apparently there are. >> Thank you very much Alok. That was great. And I I really love the work that you guys are doing with the risk five open source community. So what board do you recommend? Suppose I want to get started. I know a Raspberry Pi is arm, right?

>> Yes. >> So what's a popular risk five board not too expensive? Also do I need an SSD? Like obviously I need an SSD. So how does that work? Can I just buy like an you know, like an NVMe plug it in like >> Exactly. It has an NVMe connector on the backside. You can plug it in. Currently it's Space Mid K3 processors are the ones you want to use. >> Okay. >> The cheap part I can't help you there. >> How how much is it How much does it cost? Is it competitive with a Raspberry Pi or no?

>> Um I think as soon as you need 32 GB of RAM you pay $600 at least. >> Oh man. >> Yes, exactly. Two years ago I bought 16 GB boards for $150. This year I paid $600 $700 for the 32. And if you look now for the same things on AliExpress it's $1400. Cheap is not a not possible at the moment. But that's >> 32 gigs of RAM though for for running a node?

>> Um you can do it on smaller ones. You're right. So maybe then you can go down to 800. >> Does it work? >> Sorry? >> Uh 8 gigs of RAM? >> Then you're very limited what you can do. You can run a node with for example Nimbus nothing Geth. Ethrax is out of the question. You can't really sync it. You can run a node on 8 GB. You can do it, but it's hard mode. 16GB possible. >> Okay, cool. >> But you're still looking at several hundred dollars, but that doesn't really matter what kind of CPU you're buying. So it's ARM, Intel, they're all about the same prices now.

>> Got it. So pound for pound currently the most like budget like thing to do is not risk five, it's ARM. >> I would say so, yes. >> Okay, cool. Thank you. >> In two in maybe 10 5 10 years, I think that will change, but at the moment >> Fingers crossed. I hope it does. Thank you. >> Lovely. Is there one last question? No, it looks like we're all wrapped up. Oh. One late taker. >> I'm not super familiar, but you just said that the main cost is the RAM, but then you were talking about the CPU, right? So is is it also expensive to run a Raspberry Pi node right now?

>> As soon as you need a certain amount of RAM, RAM costs, in my impression, trump everything. So it doesn't really matter what else you're running. As soon as you need 16 or 32GB of RAM, that's what you pay for, no matter what else you put in your machine. >> Okay, so it's expensive in general. ARM doesn't need less RAM. Is that what you're saying? >> Um No no. It's just same amount of RAM for all CPU families. >> Okay, okay. >> This will probably change in a few years hopefully but at the moment it's not that good price-wise.

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