The main labs of interest for the community will be Pharos Labs.

This page includes an informal list of Pharos Labs within the community. It is not intended to replace the Pharos Lab directory anchored on the Pharos Project, but rather to provide a summary, intent, and status of the labs.

This page also includes descriptions of ad-hoc labs and/or ideas and recommendations about resources that members of the community can pursue in order to work with ARM 64-bit servers.

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. It should be understood that this

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 the ARMband call on Nov 20, 2015. 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 in an HA configuration.

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. Since the bootstrap has to be built for ubuntu rather than centos, the team is first building an x86 ubuntu-based bootstrap image to ensure that we have the tooling correct to build the bootstrap (then we will repeat the build for ARM64). We are in the build/test/debug phase with this image.

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!