An ARM Homelab Server, or a Minisforum MS-R1 Review

Source: Hacker News

Assembly

I got the MS‑R1 barebones and had a 1 TB SSD sitting around.

First, we have the box:

I opened the box and got this:

I installed my SSD and attempted to install Rocky Linux.

Rocky Linux Installation

Rocky Linux booted, but the onboard NICs weren’t detected:

I sideloaded the Realtek r8127 drivers. They loaded, but keeping the driver across kernel updates was hacky, so I switched to Fedora.

Fedora Installation

Fedora includes the RTL8127 driver (newer than RHEL 10’s freeze but not Fedora 43’s), making it work out of the box.

Homelab Picture

Here’s my obligatory homelab picture:

MS‑R1 on the top, then two MS‑01s, MikroTik CCR2004‑16G‑2S+PC, CRS309‑1G‑8S+IN and CSS610‑8P‑2S+IN.

The Upsides

• A reasonably powerful ARM system that doesn’t break the bank.
• Quieter than the MS‑01s; the efficiency of ARM beats an Intel 285K compared to a 9950X.
• Fedora works for everything I need; Rocky Linux works except for the NICs.
• UEFI and ACPI simplify hardware support, even for non‑Mac ARM laptops.
• The MSRP is $599, but I purchased it for $559 despite a RAM shortage.

The Downsides

• Two M.2 slots: one is occupied by Wi‑Fi and cannot be repurposed for an M.2 SSD (only U.2). RAID support is limited compared to the MS‑01 and A2.

• The Marvell AQC107 NICs were not detected by UEFI and therefore unusable:

  

• The “power on after outage” setting did not work when the power was unplugged and replugged.

Why not Debian or Ubuntu?

Although Minisforum recommends a Debian image, I’m not a fan of Debian‑based distros for this use case. I run a UniFi controller on Debian inside Incus because it’s required, not by preference. I respect Debian’s community ownership and upgrade path, but it isn’t the right fit for my homelab.

Conclusion

The ARM ecosystem is still small compared to x86, but the MS‑R1 works well as a homelab ARM hypervisor. I have no regrets despite its quirks; it serves as a secondary Samba domain controller in a FreeBSD 15.0 VM. While it won’t replace my two MS‑01s (which run a lot of x86 software), it’s a valuable addition to my setup.