Works on ARM news, Issue 9, Friday June 16, 2017 (Week 25)
Works on ARM news is written and edited by Ed Vielmetti at Packet. It comes out weekly on Fridays on Twitter's @worksonarm account and via Github. Subscription details are at the bottom of this issue.
In this issue:
Elasticsearch port to ARM, Test Go 1.9 beta 1, Test Rust 1.18, Cavium ThunderX2 launch partners, Qualcomm Centriq 2400 at AnsibleFest, Frankfurt HPC conference, Fedora 26 Beta, Debian 9 LTS, Alpine 3.6.2, Gitlab Omnibus CI for ARM work in progress, QCloud hosted ARM in China
Photo: Ilya Dmitrichenko from WeaveWorks is left in the photo with the Packet banner along with Rajendra Alapaty from Striped Giraffe Innovation & Strategy GMBH at AnsibleFest London, showing the Qualcomm Centriq 2400.
Port: Elasticsearch to ARM
Elastic is working on a port of Elasticsearch to ARM. Elasticsearch is a search and analytics engine with a REST API. Drew Raines is leading up the effort, which is nearing the point where the test suite completes without error. Drew writes:
These commits produce a working Elasticsearch binary and get the full test suite to pass. It has not been tested in any production capacity.
https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/25318
Call to action: Test Go 1.9 Beta 1; Go floating point.
Go 1.9 Beta 1 is in a test phase. If your project requires Go, please put together a simple test plan that includes the Go 1.9 Beta 1 binary release. Feedback of any sort, including benchmarks, build tests, or especially documentation, are all welcomed.
https://github.com/golang/go/issues/19082
One open issue that will not be addressed in Go 1.9, however, is discrepancies in the math libraries that result in exp(1) giving different results depending on what hardware you are using. In issue golang/go 20319 the analysis is that some platforms use assembly language and others use Go do to floating point. "amd64 and s390x have assembly implementations, all the others architectures use a pure go routine and they implement different algorithms, so last-bit-mismatches are not unexpected."
https://github.com/golang/go/issues/20319
The Go (golang) page on Works on ARM has been updated with the latest information; see http://worksonarm.com/golang for more details.
Call to action: Test Rust 1.18 on ARM!
"Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety."
Rust 1.18 has been released; the release notes suggest performance improvements in the compiler.
https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/06/08/Rust-1.18.html
See http://worksonarm.com/rust for more details.
Hardware: Cavium ThunderX2
Cavium has a series of announcements about their new ThunderX2 hardware. The Cavium news release gives brief details of partnerships with Altair (graphics rendering with Thea Render), AMI (UEFI), ARM, Bright Computing, Bull, Canonical (Ubuntu), Linaro (development cloud), Numerical Algorithms Group, Red Hat, Rogue Wave (debugging), and SUSE, plus mention of hosted options at Packet and Scaleway.
https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/cavium-expands-thunderx2-server-ecosystem-cloud-hpc/
Hardware: Qualcomm Centriq 2400
Packet is showcasing Qualcomm's new Centriq 2400 at developer conferences and providing attendees access to a number of demos that use open source tools such as Ansible, Terraform, Docker and Kubernetes. These demos of Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies’ ARM architecture-based servers are at Red Hat’s AnsibleFest conference in London, and also be present at Hashiconf in Austin, the Open Source Summit North America in Los Angeles, and AnsibleFest in San Francisco.
Events: Frankfurt HPC conference
Frankfurt was the center of the high performance computing world this week, with ISC's HPC conference winding up on Thursday.
The GoingARM account live-tweeted the ARM portion of the HPC conference which featured several standing-room only sessions about ARM for HPC and a Thursday workshop.
Distro: Fedora 26 Beta
Fedora announced Fedora 26 Beta, which has support for ARM. "A Beta release is code-complete and bears a very strong resemblance to the third and final release. The final release of Fedora 26 is expected in July."
https://arm.fedoraproject.org/ https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-the-release-of-fedora-26-beta/
See http://worksonarm.com/fedora for more details.
Distro: Debian 9 LTS
Debian released Debian 9 "Stretch" for ARM on June 17. This is an LTS release.
https://lists.debian.org/debian-announce/2017/msg00003.html
A total of ten architectures are supported: 64-bit PC / Intel EM64T / x86-64 (amd64), 32-bit PC / Intel IA-32 (i386), 64-bit little-endian Motorola/IBM PowerPC (ppc64el), 64-bit IBM S/390 (s390x), for ARM, armel and armhf for older and more recent 32-bit hardware, plus arm64 for the 64-bit "AArch64" architecture, and for MIPS, in addition to the two 32- bit mips (big-endian) and mipsel (little-endian), there is a new mips64el architecture for 64-bit little-endian hardware. Support for 32- bit Motorola/IBM PowerPC (powerpc) has been removed in "Stretch".
See http://worksonarm.com/debian for more details.
Distro: Alpine 3.6.2
Alpine released an Alpine 3.6.2 point release on June 17, 2017. This is a bug fix release, and includes additional drivers enabled for some Mellanox ethernet cards.
https://alpinelinux.org/posts/Alpine-3.6.2-released.html
See http://worksonarm.com/alpine-linux for more details.
CI: Gitlab CI Omnibus for ARM
An open issue in the continuous integration world is how best and easiest to run on ARM. One aspect of this is Gitlab, and there's an open issue in the Omnibus Gitlab project for how to get your Gitlab CI completely self-hosted on ARM.
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/issues/1625
See http://worksonarm.com/gitlab for more details.
QCloud Hosted ARM in China
New to the ARM hosting world, QCloud (Tencent Cloud) has a service 黑石 (translated here as Blackstone) for hosted ARM servers. Devices are available for monthly or yearly reservations. All of the available documentation on the service is for the China market.
https://www.qcloud.com/product/arm
A rough translation:
Blackstone ARM Server (CPM for ARM) is a bare metal rental service for ARM servers. The Blackstone ARM example uses the ARMv8 architecture, which provides greater memory capacity and more physical cores, with more performance and more competitive TCO (total cost of ownership); and naturally compatible mobile applications, no need for Instruction set translation. If your business is high concurrent or mobile scene, Blackstone ARM server will be a very wise choice.
Colophon
Written with vim on a MacBook Pro with a hardware escape key.
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