[CentOS-devel] Building ARM64 RPMs on AMD64?

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 ....

-- 
Fabian Arrotin
The CentOS Project | https://www.centos.org
gpg key: 17F3B7A1 | twitter: @arrfab

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