ARM Build?

[CraigChrist8239]

I've been running a factorio server on a machine I have in my basement. Less than 1GB of RAM and cheap dual-core Pentium, and yet I can play no problems (yet).

This got me thinking about my Raspberry Pi 3 I got for christmas. It has 1GB of RAM (more) and a quad-core processor (better), so it should be able to handle a headless Factorio server no problems, right?

Well I just need an ARM build. I've seen people ask for it online (https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=15011), but that was with the RPi 2 with half as much RAM.

tl;dr: Can we revist this topic? I would absolutely love an ARM build and I'm almost positive the Pi 3 could handle a headless version.
PS: For bonus points, make a MIPS build for my VoCore :P

[daniel0674]

The ARM build won't happen, I'm sorry. While the Raspberry has a quad-core processor Factorio only uses one core and it may be sufficient for a small base, but when running a big base or using mods it would not be able to keep up with the load.

There's also cross-platfom determinism to take into account, they only recently stopped providing 32-bit releases of Factorio (Friday facts #158 - The end of the 32 bit era[www.factorio.com]) as they caused problems when used in Multiplayer which was solved by making sure everyone is using the 64-bit version of the game. In theory it would be possible to compile Factorio to run on a Raspberry PI, but the dev team would have to invest a lot of hours to make sure it runs correctly and properly communicates with 64-bit clients. I'm not saying that it's impossible, but the likelihood is very low considering they ended 32-bit support because of some desync reports.

[CraigChrist8239]

Hm, I wasn't aware Factorio only uses one core. I was under the impression that it was multi-threaded. My server machine now is only running an 800Mhz processor and the RPi is still 1.2Ghz so it should still outperform my current machine thats working just fine. And I just checked, that machine that works fine is only a 1-core 800Mhz pentium. Idk how it runs a Factorio server but it works.

I would like to point out that the RPi3 has a 64-bit ARM processor. I understand there may still be some things to check for, but its all still 64-bit little endian so I (as a programmer myself) cannot think of a situation where it couldn't communicate nicely with other 64-bit little endian clients. Also, the RPi can run debian, which is what I'm running on my server machine now.

Another point, I read that article and, they say they discontinued 32-bit support in part because only 1% of the userbase uses 32-bit. I wonder how many would use an ARM build. How hard would it be to maintain a seperate ARM build? I imagine fairly easy, just a matter of some build parameters. Surely easy enough to justify the small amout of users who might use it.

I'm not asking for playing on the RPi with graphics and all, just a version of the headless server files for it.

[KatherineOfSky]

You will need much more memory to run with any number of people playing... on a normal map, we use around 4 GB of RAM for a handful of players. On a modded map, we clocked in at around 10-11 GB of RAM.

[supernet2]

Boy did this not age well. Given The game now runs butter smooth on a nintendo switch which is ARM based, Switch CPU is ARM 4 Cortex-A57. Only a matter of time before we see it running on pi 3 model b and up with out issue (as far as running the game goes). I can run factorio headless servers off my pi3, and pi4. So i can only imagine that means the game itself can technically run off the pi anyway. Smoothly... well... thats a different story, takes like forever to load, but spinning up a server on a pi? Takes about 3min on a pi4. and 6.8min on a pi3 model b.

Edit: And thats with like 56 mods on both pi 3 and pi4.

Edit: Nintendo switch, and steam and gog, and the factorio.com standalone builds worked running, with a total of 8 concurrent users with that many mods (all on local lan), remotely... well that didn't run to well when on dedicated wifi, on hardwired, was "Okay" till the map size got to about 1.4gb then you could noticeably tell there was lag, and it would take like 15-20sec to save in 10min intervals.

Edit: Also my synology nas servers, always were able to run factorio within and outside of docker images, headless, and non headless using vmm, or docker. Ran far more smoothly than the raspberry pi 3 and 4 given the much more abundance of cpu power, and NVMEs slotted in the synology nas systems though.

[Storm]

Waiting for ARM64 headless version of server for my Debian-based NanoPi M4V2 with RK3399(Dual-Core Cortex-A72(up to 2.0GHz) + Quad-Core Cortex-A53(up to 1.5GHz) + 4Gb RAM) !