By Geoff Levand, April 14, 2015
Originally published on the CoreOS blog (archived copy) . Re-published with the authors' permission.
This is a guest post from CoreOS contributor, Geoff Levand, Linux Architect, Huawei America Software Lab. He has started work on an ARM64 port of CoreOS. Here is the current state of the project, followed by how you can help.
Recent patches that I’ve contributed to CoreOS have added basic support for a new target board named arm64-usr. There is currently a single generic ARM64 little endian Linux profile. This profile should work with any ARM64 platform currently supported by the mainline Linux kernel, so the ARM V8 Foundation Model, the ARM FVP_VE Fast Model, the ARM FVP_BASE Fast Model, and recent qemu-system-aarch64. I hope to add other profiles to support an ARM64 big endian build, and also to get the eight-core HiSilicon 6220 based HiKey developer board supported.
ARM64 porting work is still in progress, so please consider what is done so far as experimental. Some initial work I did along with Michael Marineau of CoreOS was to clean up parts of the CoreOS build system to simplify the way architectures are defined, and also to make the generic build infrastructure completely architecture agnostic. The resulting system should make it quite straight forward to add additional architecture support to CoreOS.
The ARM64 architecture is a relatively new one, so many upstream software packages have either only recently been updated to support ARM64, or have not yet been. Much of my CoreOS porting work so far has been going through the packages which don’t build and figuring out how to get them to build. Sometimes a package can be updated to the latest upstream, sometimes a package keyword can be set, sometimes a modification to the ebuild in coreos-overlay will work, and other times a combination of these are needed. This process is still ongoing, and some difficult packages still lay ahead. The resulting arm64-usr build is experimental and all the work to bring it up will need testing and review in the future.
There is still a lot of work to be done. Many more packages need to be brought up, and as I mentioned, this involves working at a low level with the package ebuild files and the CoreOS build system. At another level, all the CoreOS features will need to be exercised and verified as needed to bring up the stability and confidence of the port. There are going to be multi-arch clusters, so ARM64 and x86_64 nodes are going to need to work together – it sounds pretty cool. Someone will need to get in there and make that happen. If you have any interest in the ARM64 port I encourage you get involve and help out.
For general info about the port you can look at my Github site. For those who would like to investigate more, or even help with the effort, see my CoreOS ARM64 HOWTO document.
Continue the discussion with Geoff at CoreOS Fest and on freenode in #coreos as geoff-