[toast0]

Depends what 'home server' means.

MacOS would need syncookies to be a viable tcp server on public IPs, IMHO, but MacOS pulled FreeBSD's TCP stack a couple months before syncookies were added, and they never rebased or otherwise added syncookies later.

I haven't looked into if they pulled any scalability updates over the years, but I kind of assume they haven't, and the stack would have a lot of lock contention if you had more than say 10,000 tcp sockets.

Given that, if I were Apple compatible, I might run a mini as a LAN server, but my home servers provide services for the LAN as well as some public services (of limited value and usefulness, but still public).

[astrange]

The network stack is very different now - BSD doesn't run on cell phones after all. But no syncookies, no.

But IMO the real advantage of ARMv8 for a server is that it has better security.

[saagarjha]

I don't really think ARMv8 has anything useful to provide here?

[astrange]

It's all in there, it's just optional.

Plus it doesn't have variable length instructions.

[saagarjha]

I'm still not entirely sure what the security improvements are?

[teaearlgraycold]

Perhaps they would be good execution nodes if not good endpoints.

[carlosjobim]

Is this something that you can fix by putting the server behind Cloudflare? I assume most "home server" users would do that (or a similar service provided by Apple if they go down that route).

[toast0]

Well, Cloudflare is kind of spendy if you want them to proxy non-http traffic.

If you put a proxy in front, and you're careful to only allow inbound connections from the proxy, you should be ok though.