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Works on Arm News, Issue 18, September 1, 2017 (Week 35)

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.

In this issue

  • Docker 17.07.0-ce on test.docker.com
  • Go 1.9 release
  • Arm rebranding
  • MacchiatoBIN benchmarking and cooling

Docker 17.07.0-ce on test.docker.com

Docker 17.07.0-ce is the latest release of Docker. It is now available with support for aarch64 (arm64) systems through the convenient installation script provided at https://test.docker.com . The install script supports Ubuntu Xenial (16.04 LTS).

The Github repository for the Docker installation script is at https://github.com/docker/docker-install/ and the changes to add aarch64 were committed in docker/docker-install#18 which also adds support for IBM's s390x architecture.

Docker provides an installation script at test.docker.com for installing testing versions of Docker CE into development environments quickly and non-interactively. The source code for the scripts is in the docker-install repository. Using these scripts is not recommended for production environments.

Docker's release schedule produces monthly test releases, leading up to a quarterly supported release. Support for CE ("community edition") is provided by the community, and EE ("enterprise edition") is provided commercially. As of this writing there is CE support, but not EE support, for 64-bit Arm architectures.

Go 1.9 release

The latest Go release, version 1.9, arrives six months after Go 1.8 and is the tenth release in the Go 1.x series. There are two changes to the language: adding support for type aliases and defining when implementations may fuse floating point operations. Most of the changes are in the implementation of the toolchain, runtime, and libraries.

Systems with many cores will benefit from Go 1.9's improvements in parallelism. The Go compiler now supports compiling a package's functions in parallel, taking advantage of multiple cores. This is in addition to the go command's existing support for parallel compilation of separate packages.

Go 1.9 now ships with binaries for arm64.

Arm rebranding

Arm Holdings has updated their branding, resulting in a wordmark that is all lower case, and recommendations for the use of "Arm" instead of "ARM" in references to the company. From their trademarks page:

From 1 August 2017, Arm has a new look and feel. The business has a new corporate logo and it is now using the Arm word in sentence case instead of the ARM word in uppercase in text. We ask all of Arm’s customers, partners, licensees and any other third parties to use the Arm word in sentence case in text in all relevant materials.

Works on Arm News will adjust accordingly, though there's some muscle memory that needs to be retrained.

MACCHIATObin booting, benchmarking and cooling

Gábor Samu of IBM has a new MACCHIATObin board that he's putting through its paces. The MACCHIATObin has four Armv8 cores and is based on the Marvell ARMADA 8040 processor. His bringup blog is interesting, noting several issues:

  • The system runs hot enough that it needs either an active fan or (in Gábor's case) outdoor cooling if you have a Canadian climate.
  • Though some early press accounts referred to the board as SBSA ready, the actual installation process currently defined on the wiki is much more complex than an SBSA bring-up would be.

The benchmark tooling used was the Phoronix test suite, which has an extensive set of tests looking at memory, CPU, network, disk, and overall system performance.

Subscription information

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 ed@packet.net if you'd like a direct email.

Back and current issues are available from the Works on Arm News archive on Github.