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.
- "Momentum is Building for ARM in HPC", The Next Platform
- Kubernetes 1.7 release
- Xen 4.9 release
- Docker for Raspbian (ARMv6) for v17.07
- Apache Mesos on ARM
- Armbian Linux for development boards
"Momentum is Building for ARM in HPC" is an article in The Next Platform by Jonathan Beard and Roxana Rusitoru of ARM Holdings chronicling the GoingARM workshop at the recent ISC conference on high-performance computing in Frankfurt, Germany.
https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/06/30/momentum-building-arm-hpc/
From looking around the room, it was clear the workshop was significantly more popular than expected. During the entire day, there was standing room only, having throughout the day approximately 70 attendees. In spite of the crowded room, the audience stuck it out to hear from early users of SVE simulators (University of Michigan), application and runtime porters (BSC, AVL), ARM library and Allinea tool designers, RIKEN, Cavium and the lead on the Isambard project (University of Bristol).
The article was subsequently picked up by Hacker News, with a measure of interesting discussion.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14673154
Kubernetes announced a 1.7 release on Thursday, June 29, 2017. The release notes speak of security hardening, a mechanism for handling embedded secrets, and a set of improvements related to making stateful updates.
Kubernetes 1.7 ships with native ARM64 support for client, server, and node binaries, making 64-bit ARM a first-class platform for developers.
Xen is a hypervisor. The project releases Xen 4.9 on 28th of June, 2017. The release notes are extensive, and include a whole set of ARM improvments. Among those include this:
Alternative runtime patching and GICv3 support for ARM32: Alternative runtime patching which enables the hypervisor to apply workarounds for erratas affecting the processor and to apply optimizations specific to a CPU and GICv3 support was extended for 32-bit ARM platforms, bringing this functionality to embedded use-cases.
System Error Detection (ARM): Xen on ARM made a step forward in reliability and serviceability with the introduction of System Error detection and reporting, a key feature for customers with highly available systems.
https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_Project_4.9_Release_Notes
In the Github repository docker/docker-ce-packaging issue 11, Stefan Scherer writes:
This PR adds build steps to create DEB packages for Raspbian and for all Raspberry Pi models including the ARMv6 Pi Zero, Pi Zero W or old Raspberry Pi (1) model A/B.
I'm now running 17.07.0-dev on my Raspberry Pi Zero W.
I kept the names of the Dockerfiles at Dockerfile.armv7l so someone can build them on eg. Scaleway servers.
Docker support for the smallest and oldest Raspberry Pi models requires ARMv6 support; this support had been dropped in Docker 17.06-ce, as Docker went through a series of reconfigurations with their "moby" and "Linuxkit" projects. This PR is community provided, and not merged into Docker mainline code or packaging.
Yuqi Gu & Yibo Cai of ARM gave a presentation on "Running Marathon/Mesos on ARM Server" at MesosCon Asia in Beijing on June 22, 2017.
Marathon/Mesos has been well adopted and deployed, in X86 architecture servers. How about running Marathon/Mesos in ARM server? Fortunately, we proved that only small effort is required to port Marathon/Mesos onto ARM AArch64 servers. There are a few small traps and tricks, but the overall porting is straightforward. We would like to present running Marathon/Mesos in ARM servers to manage a cluster on top of which some applications can be deployed and scaled in containers.
The Mesos on ARM presentation slides describe the work necessary for the port at slide 6, where the authors point out the Mesos includes vendored dependencies for protobuf, Zookeeper, libev, and Leveldb, each of which has no AArch64 support in their old versions but when brought forward to current versions handle AArch64 properly. In addition there is a dependency on Google's "glog" logging library that had to be addressed.
The authors report that Mesos master and slave nodes work properly once these changes have been made, and from that point forward cluster operations are as normal.
Armbian Linux is a Debian derivative with support for a number of ARM based development boards. Led by Igor Pečovnik of Ljubljana, Slovenia, this project uses an "advanced but easy to use" x86 based toolchain to make boot image from sources for a wide range of supported boards:
Beelink X2, Orange Pi PC plus, Orange Pi Plus 2E, Orange Pi Lite, Roseapple Pi, NanoPi M1, pcDuino2, pcDuino3, Odroid C0/C1/C1+, Banana Pi M2+, Hummingboard 2, Odroid C2, Orange Pi 2, Orange Pi One, Orange Pi PC, Orange Pi Plus 1 & 2, Clearfog, Lemaker Guitar, Odroid XU4, Udoo Neo, Banana Pi M2, Orange Pi A31S, Cubieboard 1, Cubieboard 2, Hummingboard, Lamobo R1, Banana Pi PRO, Orange Pi mini A20, Olimex Lime A10, Olimex Micro, Olimex Lime 2, pcDuino3 nano, Banana Pi Plus A20, Udoo quad, Orange Pi A20, Olimex Lime 1, Banana Pi, Cubox-i, Cubietruck
Recent work has focused on both legacy kernels which tend to offer more device support including video and display features, as well as mainline kernels with support primarily for headless server operations.
Written on a holiday-shortened July 4 week. The local parade featured a lawnmower brigade and a theatrical stagefighting troupe. Written with vim on a MacBook Pro.
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