[Arm-dev] supported 64bit hardware

Jim Perrin jperrin at centos.org
Sun Sep 18 15:13:07 UTC 2016



On 09/18/2016 03:46 AM, Nick Hardiman wrote:
> Which 64 bit consumer-size board is the easiest to work with now?

Most of the consumer boards have very odd idiosyncrasies that often mean
trouble. For example the hikey works just fine with the uefi firmware,
but the partitioning established by default means that the EFI boot
partition is /boot, instead of the more common (standard) /boot/efi.
Most of the other 64bit boards rely on uboot or other bootloaders that
are problematic to support. The more recent uboots have a uefi emulation
that we might be able to take advantage of *if* the boards support
upstream uefi and not their own custom forks.

> 
> I want to buy a few small ARMv8 boards to run CentOS on. Seems like a reasonable idea to offload simple services onto simple boards. Is this page still accurate?
> https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/AltArch/AArch64
> 
> I don’t really know why 64 bits gets all the attention at this small scale, but that does seem to be where people are headed.
> I’ve tried a few 32 bit boards, and it is fiddly work. I end up spending more time on the bootloader and kernel compilation and less time at the application level.
> 

That's pretty much exactly why we've been sticking to requiring UEFI
functionality for full support of the boards.

> AFAICT, progress is being made getting Odroid C2 support into the kernel. Not so sure about Hikey and RPi3. Looks like Redhat is working with Applied Micro X-gene - I guess that's for the data center market.


The initial target is absolutely server and DC, as centos is
traditionally quite popular in those markets. We build and test with
Applied Micro, Cavium, and AMD's Seattle chipsets.


I do want to start looking at larger (god help me for using this term)
IOT style devices or gateway devices, where we can provide the sort of
life-cycle those devices typically lack. I covered a bit about the hikey
earlier. I'm waiting to see when/if the cello arrives. In theory it will
support CentOS right out of the box.

The other one I've had my eye on is the
https://www.solid-run.com/product/armada-8040-networking-community-board/

I don't know if it will work ootb, but it supports uefi, and *seems* to
have all the right supportable bits. When I get my hands on it, I'll let
you know.

If you're interested in helping out with this, I would wholeheartedly
encourage you to join the efforts.

-- 
Jim Perrin
The CentOS Project | http://www.centos.org
twitter: @BitIntegrity | GPG Key: FA09AD77


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