Works on ARM news is written and edited by Ed Vielmetti at Packet. It comes out weekly on Fridays on Twitter's @worksonarm account and via Github and Gitbook. Subscription details are at the bottom of this issue.
- Interview: Jim Perrin on CentOS on ARM
- ARM HPC Users Group
- Ask Ubuntu: Running 32-bit ARM on 64-bit systems
- SUSE Linux (SLES) on ARM
- 24-core Socionext server
- EFI and U-Boot on Dragonboard 410c
- Gitlab Omnibus edition via elraro, ready for testing
- Linuxkit on ARM
- Ubuntu on Raspberry Pi 3 compute module
- Go 1.9 Beta 2
- Colophon
Jim Perrin is interviewed by Jake Edge for LWN.net.
Perrin is currently with Red Hat and is the maintainer of the CentOS 64-bit ARM (aarch64) build. CentOS is his full-time job; he works on building the community around CentOS as well as on some of the engineering that goes into it.
The interview goes into detail of the history of CentOS on ARM, starting with 32-bit ARMv6 and ARMv7 builds on embedded systems and continuing to this on high performance computing gear.
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/726441/c186b1566dc5d794/
Follow Jim on Twitter as @bitintegrity or read his occasional weblog at http://www.bit-integrity.com/ .
The ARM HPC Users Group is providing "resources for end-users and developers deploying on ARM hardware" for high performance computing. It was organized from a successful workshop at the ISC conference in Frankfurt in June 2017. There is an ARM HPC Gitlab system set up for collaboration, an ARM HPC mailing list and Slack channel available.
Presentations given in Frankfurt are available at the GoingARM.com web site.
Ask Ubuntu has a question on running 32-bit ARM codes on 64-bit systems. While most cell phone derived ARM SoCs support a mix of 32-bit and 64-bit operations, the data center grade platform based on Cavium's ThunderX available at Packet and Scaleway is a 64-bit only system.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/928249/how-to-run-armhf-executables-on-an-arm64-system
Jay Kruemcke is product manager for SUSE Linux Enterprise System (SLES) on ARM. He writes to share that he has a blog, https://kruemcke.com , which has news which includes SUSE on ARM information. Follow Jay on on Twitter: @mr_sles.
The Works on ARM website that I edit has updated its information about SUSE Linux on ARM, and you'll find those details at http://worksonarm.com/suse .
At the Taipei trade show Computex, Socionext shared information of their 24-core ARM SoC, the SynQuacer SC2A11. It features high efficiency A53 cores and 1 gigabit networking speeds. The show floor interview, done by Charbax (Nicolas Charbonnier) of ArmDevices.net, demonstrates a cluster running Ubuntu on a number of these systems.
ARMdevices.net is a blog focused on making original video and news contents about ARM Powered devices, mostly from trade shows and conferences around the world. Nicolas Charbonnier, also known as Charbax, has posted all the videos on this site.
After some firmware hacking, Rob Clark of Red Hat has gotten EFI and U-Boot to work on the Dragonboard 410c, a development board based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 410E processor. He refers to the sometimes sorry state of ARM firmware on development boards - where every device needs a new boot loader
Anyone who has dealt with arm (non-server) devices, should be familiar with the silly-embedded-nonsense-hacks world. In particular the non-standard boot-chain which makes it difficult for distro's to support the plethora of arm boards (let alone phones/tablets/etc) out there without per-board support. Which was fine in the early days, but N boards times M distro's, it really doesn't scale.
http://bloggingthemonkey.blogspot.fi/2017/06/long-overdue-update.html
As mentioned in WOA 9, Gitlab is a source code hosting tool available in open source form to be self-hosted. elraro has done the work to port the Gitlab Omnibus Edition to ARMv8 and has produced a build script and binary release based on Gitlab 9.3-stable. The major compatibility issue identified is the need to run a current ncurses 6.0 as the older 5.9 release has some issues with ARM support.
https://github.com/elraro/gitlab-ce-omnibus-armv8
Linuxkit is a unikernel style operating system construction kit that came out of work on Docker to rearchitect their system to make it more flexible and component driven. Richard Mortier (mort) has done the first step to port Linuxkit to ARMv8, running on bare metal Packet hardware.
http://mort.io/blog/2017/06/02/arming-linuxkit/
Canonical has announced that Ubuntu Core is now available for the Raspberry Pi 3 compute module. This compact computer is the size of an SO-DIMM memory module, and is designed to be used in embedded systems.
Following close on the heels of last week's Go 1.9 announcement is an update that Go 1.9 Beta 2 is available.
https://twitter.com/golang/status/879462496372785157
As always, your bug reports and success reports with this beta test are particularly welcome.
Written with vim on a MacBook Pro. Produced with Github, and new this week also available on Gitbook. Original formatting in Markdown. Coffee by Roos Roast in Ann Arbor, MI.
As an aside, Gitbook has a nice presentation of these files, and was easy to set up and sync up. It has a Markdown visual split screen editor that speeds up correction of formatting issues. The Gitbook authors have said that they are hard at work on a 2.0 edition, which I'm looking forward to.
Works on ARM News is released weekly on Fridays. Follow @worksonarm on Twitter for the weekly link, or follow the worksonarm-news project on Github for notifications. Email to [email protected] if you'd like a direct email.
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