On 05/12/2020 20:15, Simon Matter wrote:
Hi,
We are thinking about adding ARM64 based devices to our systems.
As we are using CentOS almost everywhere and have quite a number of inhouse RPM packages in our company repository, we'd like to enhance it and add ARM64 alias aarch64 to it.
What I'm still wondering is how to run the build environment for the new arch?
How does the CentOS project do it, run ARM64 hardware or using emulation? Or to ask differently, is it an option to run the build system emulated with QEMU?
Thanks for any insights?
Simon
Easy answer : we don't use emulation but build on target architecture[s] (same for IBM power ppc64 and ppc64le) For aarch64, we have a mix of ThunderX/ThunderX2 and Ampere servers. For armhfp, we run kvm armhfp guests on top of Ampere servers , so aarch64 hypervisors booting armhfp/armv7hl (worth knowing that Ampere let you do that, while it's *impossible* to run 32bits arm on ThunderX/ThunderX2)
If you don't have access to real aarch64 hardware and just want to use such nodes to build/compile/test, I'd suggest using some Cloud options. For example, we have official CentOS 7 and 8 aarch64 AMI images that can run natively on AWS EC2 aarch64 nodes
Emulation/translation for different arch (or cross-compiling) is nothing but asking for troubles further down the road ....