I recently purchased a System76 Thelio Astra workstation. It’s one of the first workstations available with an Ampere Altra (Max) ARM64 processor. It’s also very reasonably priced for the amount of compute and RAM you can purchase.

Although the workstation comes with Ubuntu by default, I prefer to use Debian as my Linux distro. I’ve recorded some notes on setting up the workstation here.

Hardware

I ordered the Astra with the Ampere Altra Max M128-30 128-core @ 3.0 Ghz CPU, 512 GB RAM, a 4 GB NVMe M.2 SSD, and the 4 GB Nvidia A400 GPU. According to the support team, the Astra model I recieved uses the ASRock ALTRAD8UD2-1L2Q motherboard. This is a change from the model mentioned in the Phoronix review.

The motherboard provides a 1 Gb ethernet port (Intel i210) and 2 SFP28 (Broadcom BCM57414) ports. The latter can be used for 25 GbE with an adapter (which System76 included). Notably, the motherboard only has 4 USB ports which support up to USB 3.1 Gen 1. They do not support USB 3.1 Gen 2 which offers 10 Gb/s throughput, a bump over the 5 Gb/s throughput provided by USB 3.1 Gen 1. A PCIe expansion card can probably be used to provide additional USB ports and support for the USB 3.1 Gen 2 protocol. The motherboard provides 4 PCIe slots. It should be noted that two of the slots are PCIe 4.0 x16, but the remaining two slots are x16 (Altra Max) or x8 (Altra) depending on the CPU you order. Support told me that at one point they ran into issues in which the graphics card would only work if plugged into the third PCIe slot. They think this is resolved now, but I don’t plan on testing it in other slots anytime soon, so I can’t verify.

In the configuration options, System76 provides an opportunity for adding more NMVe SSD drives. According to the support team, this is accomplished using a M.2 PCIe expansion card. (I recently ordered the ASUS Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 PCIe card which I’m using with 4 8 TB Western Digital Black SSDs in my AMD Threadripper workstation.)

A note about the case. The case is nice overall, but it is not as convenient to open as the VSX-R7 Series Mid Tower Chassis used by AMD Threadripper workstation from Thinkmate. There are two particular issues. First, the Thinkmate case uses bigger screws that can be screwed both by hand using a texture surface around the circumference of the head as well as a screwdriver. Secondly, the Thinkmate case has removal separate side panels, while the System76 Thelio case’s top and sides are one unit that comes off together. Since the power button is on the removable part, I don’t see an obvious way to boot the computer with the case open should you want to check that a hardware change works before reassembling it.

So far, the machine is pretty quiet. Server cases generally have much louder fans, so many of the existing Ampere Altra servers aren’t really suitable for use as workstations in an office or home environment. The Thelio Astra was obviously designed to be put under or by a desk.

Support

I’ve reached out to System76 support a few times and had nothing but very positive experiences. After I ordered, I wanted to know the particular motherboard that was used so I could look into options for adding more storage. After I recieved the machine, I was very confused when it didn’t appear to boot (see below). Support called me the next business day and quickly resolved my “problem exists between keyboard and chair” (PEBKAC) issue.

Booting

Booting the Astra takes a LONG time. I initially thought that my machine wasn’t functional because I didn’t see any monitor output and I couldn’t get caps, scroll, or num lock to work on the keyboard. It turns out that it just takes 10-15 minutes for the system to boot up.

Installing Debian

I was able to successfully use the arm64 DVD/USB ISO image to install Debian 12 (bookworm). The graphical installer couldn’t start X11 successfully. I had no issues with the text-based installer. I was up and running in a few minutes.

After install, X11 started without issue, and I was able to log into a GNOME session. GNOME was very slow, likely due to limited support for the Nvidia A400 GPU by the Nouveau open-source driver. Not a huge issue for me since I intend to access the machine mostly through SSH.

Note to self: the normal user account created by Debian on install isn’t part of the sudo group. The user needs to be added to the sudo group with:

$ adduser rnowling sudo

The sudo group, however, is already enabled in the /etc/sudoers config file.

Hibernate / Suspend Problems

I did have an issue resuming the machine once it fell asleep. I disabled the functionality by editing /etc/systemd/sleep.conf.d/nosuspend.conf to:

[Sleep]
AllowSuspend=no
AllowHibernation=no
AllowSuspendThenHibernate=no
AllowHybridSleep=no

and restarting the Systemd login service with:

$ sudo systemctl restart systemd-logind.service

Configuring Networking

Not unique to this machine, the wired ethernet connection seems to need to be manually connected using Network Manager. To handle that automatically, I installed the netplan.io package and followed instructions in the Debian manual to create the config file /etc/netplan/50-dhcp.yaml with the following:

network:
  version: 2
  renderer: NetworkManager
  ethernets:
    all-en:
      match:
        name: "enP3p5s0"
      dhcp4: true
      dhcp6: true

and running

$ sudo netplan generate
$ sudo systemctl reload NetworkManager

Note that I changed the adapter name pattern from en* to enP3p5s0 since the Thelio Astra has 3 network adapters. With this change, the machine connects to the network on reboot automatically.

Overall, a great machine so far!

Update 01-09-2024

GPUs Work in Other PCIe Slots

I moved the GPU that came with the machine to PCIe slot 4 and had no issues whatsoever. I can confirm that there is no longer a requirement for the GPU to be in a specific PCIe slot.

Setting Up the NVMe PCIe Expansion Card

I was able to get the aforementioned ASUS Hyper M.2 NVMe PCIe card working with 4 NVMe drives. It’s important that you set the PCIe lane width to x4x4x4x4 in the UEFI setup. To access this setting, you need:

  1. Press the DEL key when the System76 splash screen appears to access the UEFI setup
  2. Go to the Advanced tab
  3. Go to the Chipset Configuration option
  4. Select PCIE Link Width
  5. Change the width to x4x4x4x4
  6. Press F10 to save the settings and restart

When configured correctly, you should see 5 NVMe drives when you go to the NVMe Configuration submenu on the Advanced tab. (The machine will need to be restarted first.)

I was surprised to find that the widths for PCIe lanes 6 and 7 (the two lanes closest to the CPU) cannot be controlled separately. The width setting applies to both. This is not true of PCIe lanes 4 and 5 which can be configured separately. This has implications for what PCIe devices are placed in each slot, especially since some connectors on the motherboard make it difficult to use full-length PCIe cards in some of the slots.