Non-SoC target for ARM64

[Philip Prindeville]

> On Jun 1, 2023, at 1:18 PM, Tomasz Maciej Nowak <tmn505 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> W dniu 1.06.2023 o 18:58, Philip Prindeville pisze:
>> Hi,
> 
> Hi.
> 
>> I'm thinking about the utility of being able to build a generalized ARM64 image (not "armvirt") for bring up on new platforms for testing.
>> 
>> There are a lot of generalized computing platforms like the Ampere Altra servers that you might want to use as in inbound Apache proxy server, a load balancer, a traffic shaper, etc.
>> 
>> Can we add a generic target for ARM64 just as x86_64 (or x86/64) is the generic AMD64 target?
>> 
>> I'd like something that I could easily run on a Graviton2 or Altra or Ten64, etc.
>> 
>> Also not clear to me why the various ARM targets like "layerscape", "imx", "octeontx", etc. don't live under a common directory.
>> 
>> Yes, ARM is more optimized for SoCs that have I/O on-chip and hence there's less mix-n-match compared to x86, but it's not completely unheard of either.
>> 
>> What do you all think of adding a generic target for aarch64?
>> 
>> And how awful would refactoring arm and aarch64 be?
> 
> Did You overlook this message http://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2023-May/041091.html ? Posted a week ago.


I did in fact miss this message.


> It's modifying armvirt target to boot it effortlessly on arm64 hardware.


I think having an image with drivers built in for virtualization only is fine, but another more full-featured image for actual bare metal would also be good.


> The name of target stays but that's only a name.
> 
>> Thanks,
>> 
>> -Philip
> 
> Regards
> 
> -- 
> TMN