Oracle cloud and Altra CPUs

Hi,

I wrote some notes on how far I got with Oracle & arm64 Altra systems.

Oracle is offering free** arm64 VMs, up to 4 cores & 24GiB of RAM, so
this is a very attractive platform for people who are currently fiddling
with RasbPi sized build systems.

We already know from elsewhere(tm) that the Altra cpu boots FreeBSD
13.0-RELEASE happily, so this is largely about muddling around in OCI.

https://people.freebsd.org/~dch/posts/2021-07-02-oci-bringup.html

hopefully there's enough info in here for others to get further along.

My 2 main issues:

- not entirely clear what hardware Oracle's KVM cloud is giving us

- installer fails at loader with infamous `error 19` presumably as
  I don't have sufficient drivers available to read from the disk image
  that we just started from

Getting either FreeBSD HTTP boot working, or failing that, IPXE chain
booting, would be nice also.

I have some rough notes up on that:

- https://people.freebsd.org/~dch/posts/2020-06-02-freebsd-http-booting.html

A+
Dave
—
O for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention!