The Mixtile Cluster Box is a compact chassis designed for four Blade 3 ARM64 nodes, featuring an integrated PCIe switch and a dedicated OpenWrt-based management board. The system supports a total of 32 CPU cores, 128 GB of RAM, and 8 TB of raw NVMe storage, with power consumption ranging from 30 to 40 watts under load.
The author deployed a Kubernetes cluster using Talos Linux 1.14.2 and Cozystack 1.7.0-alpha.3. The setup includes LINSTOR for storage replication, KubeVirt for hardware-accelerated KVM virtualization, and support for Mali-G610 GPU and NPU acceleration. The nodes are currently interconnected via 2.5GbE Ethernet.
The management board, based on the MediaTek MT7620A, allows for remote power control, serial console access, and monitoring of the Blade 3 nodes. While the hardware supports high-speed TCP/IP over PCIe via the MIOP driver, the lack of open-source drivers for the current kernel prevents its use for cluster networking at this time.
The project demonstrates a functional ARM64-based private cloud capable of running complex workloads, including virtual machines and monitoring stacks. Future plans include automating the node installation process through the management board and integrating the MIOP driver once it becomes available for the Talos kernel.
