ARM Graviton AWS Processor (AMI Image)

[Greg V]

On Mon, Jan 21, 2019 at 1:11 PM, Martin Karrer <martin at bmalum.com> 
wrote:
> Hello,
> This is my first message on the mailing list, please forgive me for 
> making mistakes 😉
> 
> My question is if there are any plans yet to support the Graviton ARM 
> instances of AWS?
> 
> We have a heavy load on FreeBSD and would also use the ARM instances. 
> Are there any other interested parties?
> 
> I would be happy to donate my time and help.

I have tried this. It should work very well in theory, e.g. the network 
card driver (if_ena) compiles with no changes for aarch64, and in fact 
NetBSD has ported this driver and is up and running on these instances: 
https://dmesgd.nycbug.org/index.cgi?do=view&id=4623

But my result with FreeBSD was: nothing on the console after loader.efi 
hands control to the kernel.

My build patches: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D18372 & 
https://reviews.freebsd.org/D18371

Unfortunately, AWS still has a read-only serial console (WTF?!), so 
debugging systems there is a very frustrating experience of "stop 
instance, detach disk, attach it to a running instance, do changes, 
reattach back, start". And it feels like each of these steps runs 
sleep(10000) when handling requests.

I probably didn't see anything because the serial port wasn't 
configured. Seems like AWS in their infinite wisdom have decided to 
only provide their fancy PCIe based serial port. I have tried adding 
its PCI ID to various places, configuring various boot variables with 
the memory address that Linux/ACPI shows for that device, etc. but that 
didn't help.