Wiki

Enea is building an ARM-based Pharos Lab in Kista (Stockholm) Sweden

https://wiki.opnfv.org/enea-pharos-lab.

The lab will focus first on bringing up the Fuel Installer, running on an x86-based Jump Host and deploying to 3 Applied Micro ARM64 servers as controller nodes and 2 Cavium ThunderX servers as compute nodes. Ubuntu is the target OS to be installed on the bare metal Cavium and Applied Micro servers, based on Cavium's preference.

The reasons for starting with Fuel are:

• It has a mature feature set (as an original Arno installer)
• Fuel supports VLANs (Apex appears to require individual NICs for each network), and there are a limited number of NICs on the ARM64 servers

In addition to considering Apex (formerly Foreman/Quickstack), the lab will consider using the Compass and JOID installer projects as well.

The lab will initially use Ubuntu as the target OS to be installed on top of the bare metal ARM64 servers. This is mainly based on Cavium's recommendation/preference for Ubuntu.

Note: adding lab status at the request of folks on today's ARMband call. It's dated, so please ping joe.kidder@enea.com if it hasn't been updated by Nov 27, 2015:).

Two Cavium servers are connected to the network as described in the Enea Pharos page (follow link above). These two servers will initially be configured in a non-HA configuration, one as a controller and the other as a compute.

The Applied Micro servers will ship to the lab just prior to the end of November. When they arrive the lab will become 2 Cavium computes and 3 Applied Micro controllers.

Developers are currently porting the Fuel Installer to run with ARM64 targets.

The first step, which is in progress, is building an ARM64 bootstrap target image (on which nailgun agent runs) to replace the x86 bootstrap target image that is bundled with Fuel. This has been done and the handshake between Fuel and the target bootstrap prior to deployment on targets is being debugged.

This is a place holder for other ARM-based Pharos Labs that are brewing. A recommendation is to provide a link to a Pharos Lab description page (the type that hangs from Pharos Lab list), and add a brief description of the lab.

Here is a low-cost ARMv8 platform described at 96boards.com at this link: https://www.96boards.org/products/ce/dragonboard410c/

We [at Enea] have powered this up (it comes with Android) and installed Ubuntu. It's certainly a challenging form-factor, as there's no built-in Ethernet, but it has wifi and we have added a 100mb USB enet dongle. This isn't awesome, but it's much closer to an OPNFV-capable ARMv8 SoC than BBBrC or rPi. One blocker with this device is that getting KVM running on it is not simple due to some bootstrap challenges. Anyone with interest or experience, please comment as well!